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National Advisory Board
Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian,
Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland,
Rhode Island. Certified teacher, Rhode Island.
Member of the New England Library Association, Rhode Island Library Association, and the
Rhode Island Educational Media Association.
Christopher Maloney: Head Reference Librarian,
Ocean City Free Public Library, Ocean City,
New Jersey. Member of the American Library
Association and the New Jersey Library Association. Board member of the South Jersey Library Cooperative.
Kathleen Preston: Head of Reference, New City
Library, New City, New York. Member of the
American Library Association. Received B.A.
and M.L.S. from University of Albany.
Patricia Sarles: Library Media Specialist, Canarsie High School, Brooklyn, New York. Expert
Guide in Biography/Memoir for the website
About.com (http://biography.about.com). Author of short stories and book reviews. Received
B.A., M.A. (anthropology), and M.L.S. from
Rutgers University.
Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, grades
10-12, Solomon High School, Solomon, Kansas.
Received B.S. from Kansas State University;
M.A. from Fort Hays State University.
Barbara Wencl: Library Media Specialist, Como
Park Senior High School, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Teacher of secondary social studies and history,
St. Paul, Minnesota. Received B.S. and M.Ed.
from University of Minnesota; received media
certification from University of Wisconsin. Educator and media specialist with over 30 years
experience.
PDF Not Available Due to Copyright Terms
Table of Contents
Guest Foreword
“Just a Few Lines on a Page”
by David J. Kelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi
Literary Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xvii
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xix
Anniversary (by Joy Harjo) . . . . . . . . . .1
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.2
.2
.3
.5
.6
.6
.8
.8
Astonishment (by Wislawa Szymborska) 14
Author Biography
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.15
.15
.17
.19
.20
.21
.22
Blackberrying (by Sylvia Plath) . . . . . .28
Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
V o l u m e
1 5
v
T a b l e
o f
C o n t e n t s
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.29
.31
.32
.32
.33
.33
Dream Variations (by Langston Hughes) 40
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.41
.42
.42
.43
.45
.45
.47
.48
For a New Citizen of These United States
(by Li-Young Lee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.55
.55
.55
.57
.59
.59
.60
.60
Geometry (by Rita Dove) . . . . . . . . . . .67
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.67
.68
.68
.69
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.70
.72
.72
The Horizons of Rooms
(by W. S. Merwin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.79
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The Lady of Shalott
(by Alfred Tennyson) . . . . . . . . . . . . .94
Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95
Poem Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95
Poem Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100
v i
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.101
.102
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.104
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
(by W. B. Yeats) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.120
.121
.121
.122
.124
.124
.125
.126
The Mystery (by Louise Glúck) . . . . .136
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.137
.137
.138
.139
.141
.141
.142
.143
Porphyria’s Lover
(by Robert Browning) . . . . . . . . . . .149
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.150
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.159
Rusted Legacy (by Adrienne Rich) . . .169
Author Biography
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.170
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Smart and Final Iris (by James Tate) . .182
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.183
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.184
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.188
S t u d e n t s
T a b l e
What Belongs to Us (by Marie Howe) .195
Author . . . . . . . .
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary .
Themes . . . . . . .
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Criticism . . . . . .
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.195
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Wild Geese (by Mary Oliver) . . . . . . .206
Author . . . . . . .
Poem Text . . . .
Poem Summary
Themes . . . . . .
V o l u m e
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.207
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Style . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . .
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.210
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Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .221
Cumulative Author/Title Index . . . . . . . . .241
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247
Subject/Theme Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Cumulative Index of First Lines . . . . . . . .257
Cumulative Index of Last Lines . . . . . . . . .263
v i i
Just a Few Lines on a Page
I have often thought that poets have the easiest job in the world. A poem, after all, is just a few
lines on a page, usually not even extending margin
to margin—how long would that take to write,
about five minutes? Maybe ten at the most, if you
wanted it to rhyme or have a repeating meter. Why,
I could start in the morning and produce a book of
poetry by dinnertime. But we all know that it isn’t
that easy. Anyone can come up with enough words,
but the poet’s job is about writing the right ones.
The right words will change lives, making people
see the world somewhat differently than they saw
it just a few minutes earlier. The right words can
make a reader who relies on the dictionary for
meanings take a greater responsibility for his or her
own personal understanding. A poem that is put on
the page correctly can bear any amount of analysis, probing, defining, explaining, and interrogating, and something about it will still feel new the
next time you read it.
It would be fine with me if I could talk about
poetry without using the word “magical,” because
that word is overused these days to imply “a really
good time,” often with a certain sweetness about it,
and a lot of poetry is neither of these. But if you
stop and think about magic—whether it brings to
mind sorcery, witchcraft, or bunnies pulled from
top hats—it always seems to involve stretching reality to produce a result greater than the sum of its
parts and pulling unexpected results out of thin air.
This book provides ample cases where a few simple words conjure up whole worlds. We do not ac-
V o l u m e
1 5
tually travel to different times and different cultures, but the poems get into our minds, they find
what little we know about the places they are talking about, and then they make that little bit blossom into a bouquet of someone else’s life. Poets
make us think we are following simple, specific
events, but then they leave ideas in our heads that
cannot be found on the printed page. Abracadabra.
Sometimes when you finish a poem it doesn’t
feel as if it has left any supernatural effect on you,
like it did not have any more to say beyond the actual words that it used. This happens to everybody,
but most often to inexperienced readers: regardless
of what is often said about young people’s infinite
capacity to be amazed, you have to understand what
usually does happen, and what could have happened instead, if you are going to be moved by
what someone has accomplished. In those cases in
which you finish a poem with a “So what?” attitude, the information provided in Poetry for Students comes in handy. Readers can feel assured that
the poems included here actually are potent magic,
not just because a few (or a hundred or ten thousand) professors of literature say they are: they’re
significant because they can withstand close inspection and still amaze the very same people who
have just finished taking them apart and seeing how
they work. Turn them inside out, and they will still
be able to come alive, again and again. Poetry for
Students gives readers of any age good practice in
feeling the ways poems relate to both the reality of
the time and place the poet lived in and the reality
i x
F o r e w o r d
of our emotions. Practice is just another word for
being a student. The information given here helps
you understand the way to read poetry; what to look
for, what to expect.
With all of this in mind, I really don’t think I
would actually like to have a poet’s job at all. There
are too many skills involved, including precision,
honesty, taste, courage, linguistics, passion, compassion, and the ability to keep all sorts of people
entertained at once. And that is just what they do
with one hand, while the other hand pulls some sort
of trick that most of us will never fully understand.
I can’t even pack all that I need for a weekend into
one suitcase, so what would be my chances of stuffing so much life into a few lines? With all that Poetry for Students tells us about each poem, I am
impressed that any poet can finish three or four poems a year. Read the inside stories of these poems,
and you won’t be able to approach any poem in the
same way you did before.
David J. Kelly
College of Lake County
x
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Introduction
Purpose of the Book
The purpose of Poetry for Students (PfS) is to
provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying poems by giving them easy
access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s
“For Students” Literature line, PfS is specifically
designed to meet the curricular needs of high school
and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and
researchers considering specific poems. While each
volume contains entries on “classic” poems frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries
containing hard-to-find information on contemporary poems, including works by multicultural, international, and women poets.
poem. A unique feature of PfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each poem, targeted toward the student reader.
To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each poem, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading
suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on
similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include
ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources
that provide additional material on the poem.
Selection Criteria
The information covered in each entry includes
an introduction to the poem and the poem’s author;
the actual poem text; a poem summary, to help
readers unravel and understand the meaning of the
poem; analysis of important themes in the poem;
and an explanation of important literary techniques
and movements as they are demonstrated in the
poem.
The titles for each volume of PfS were selected
by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various
school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for
College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; textbooks on
teaching the poem; a College Board survey of poems commonly studied in high schools; and a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
survey of poems commonly studied in high schools.
In addition to this material, which helps the
readers analyze the poem itself, students are also
provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each
work. This includes a historical context essay, a
box comparing the time or place the poem was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview
essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the
Input was also solicited from our advisory
board, as well as educators from various areas.
From these discussions, it was determined that each
volume should have a mix of “classic” poems
(those works commonly taught in literature classes)
and contemporary poems for which information is
often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was
V o l u m e
1 5
x i
I n t r o d u c t i o n
also placed on including works by international,
multicultural, and women poets. Our advisory
board members—educational professionals—
helped pare down the list for each volume. If a work
was not selected for the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. As
always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles
to be included in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized
Each entry, or chapter, in PfS focuses on one
poem. Each entry heading lists the full name of the
poem, the author’s name, and the date of the
poem’s publication. The following elements are
contained in each entry:
• Introduction: a brief overview of the poem
which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies
surrounding the work, and major conflicts or
themes within the work.
• Author Biography: this section includes basic
facts about the poet’s life, and focuses on events
and times in the author’s life that inspired the
poem in question.
• Poem Text: when permission has been granted,
the poem is reprinted, allowing for quick reference when reading the explication of the following section.
• Poem Summary: a description of the major
events in the poem. Summaries are broken down
with subheads that indicate the lines being discussed.
• Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed
within the poem. Each theme discussed appears
in a separate subhead and is easily accessed
through the boldface entries in the Subject/
Theme Index.
• Style: this section addresses important style elements of the poem, such as form, meter, and
rhyme scheme; important literary devices used,
such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work
might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within
the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary.
• Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the
author lived and the poem was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the
culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities
x i i
of the time in which the work was written. If the
poem is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the poem is set is also included. Each section is broken down with
helpful subheads.
• Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the poem,
including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works,
this section includes a history of how the poem
was first received and how perceptions of it may
have changed over the years; for more recent
poems, direct quotes from early reviews may
also be included.
• Criticism: an essay commissioned by PfS which
specifically deals with the poem and is written
specifically for the student audience, as well as
excerpts from previously published criticism on
the work (if available).
• Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material
used in compiling the entry, with full bibliographical information.
• Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other
critical sources which may prove useful for the
student. It includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation.
In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as
sidebars:
• Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audio
recordings as well as any film or television adaptations of the poem, including source information.
• Topics for Further Study: a list of potential
study questions or research topics dealing with
the poem. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be
studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc.
• Compare and Contrast: an “at-a-glance” comparison of the cultural and historical differences
between the author’s time and culture and late
twentieth century or early twenty-first century
Western culture. This box includes pertinent
parallels between the major scientific, political,
and cultural movements of the time or place the
poem was written, the time or place the poem
was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not
have this box.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
I n t r o d u c t i o n
• What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that
might complement the featured poem or serve
as a contrast to it. This includes works by the
same author and others, works of fiction and
nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.
Other Features
PfS includes “Just a Few Lines on a Page,” a
foreword by David J. Kelly, an adjunct professor
of English, College of Lake County, Illinois. This
essay provides a straightforward, unpretentious explanation of why poetry should be marveled at and
how Poetry for Students can help teachers show
students how to enrich their own reading experiences.
A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS
series.
A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
breaks down the authors and titles covered in each
volume of the PfS series by nationality and ethnicity.
A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be
studying a particular subject or theme rather than
a single work. Significant subjects from events to
broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry
are indicated in boldface.
A Cumulative Index of First Lines (beginning
in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who
may be familiar with the first line of a poem but
may not remember the actual title.
A Cumulative Index of Last Lines (beginning
in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who
may be familiar with the last line of a poem but
may not remember the actual title.
Each entry may include illustrations, including
a photo of the author and other graphics related to
the poem.
Citing Poetry for Students
When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Poetry for Students may
use the following general forms. These examples
are based on MLA style; teachers may request that
students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed.
V o l u m e
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When citing text from PfS that is not attributed
to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format
should be used in the bibliography section:
“Angle of Geese.” Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie
Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale,
1997. 5–7.
When quoting the specially commissioned essay from PfS (usually the first piece under the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be
used:
Velie, Alan. Critical Essay on “Angle of Geese.”
Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie Napierkowski and
Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 8–9.
When quoting a journal or newspaper essay
that is reprinted in a volume of PfS, the following
form may be used:
Luscher, Robert M. “An Emersonian Context of
Dickinson’s ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society.’”
ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance Vol. 30,
No. 2 (Second Quarter, 1984), 111–16; excerpted and
reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 1, eds. Marie
Napierkowski and Mary Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1997),
pp. 266–69.
When quoting material reprinted from a book
that appears in a volume of PfS, the following form
may be used:
Mootry, Maria K. “‘Tell It Slant’: Disguise and Discovery as Revisionist Poetic Discourse in ‘The Bean
Eaters,’” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her
Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Maria K. Mootry and
Gary Smith. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
177–80, 191; excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for
Students, Vol. 2, eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary
Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 22–24.
We Welcome Your Suggestions
The editor of Poetry for Students welcomes
your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to
suggest poems to appear in future volumes, or who
have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via Email at: ForStudentsEditors@gale.com. Or write to
the editor at:
Editor, Poetry for Students
The Gale Group
27500 Drake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48331–3535
x i i i
Literary Chronology
1809: Alfred, Lord Tennyson is born on August 6
in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England.
1929: Adrienne Rich is born in Baltimore, Maryland.
1812: Robert Browning is born in Camberwell, a
suburb of London.
1932: Sylvia Plath is born on October 27 in Boston,
Massachusetts.
1836: Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” is
published.
1935: Mary Oliver is born in Cleveland, Ohio.
1842: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of
Shalott” is published.
1939: William Butler Yeats dies on January 29 in
Roquebrune, France. In 1948, his remains are
re-interred in Drumcliff, Sligo, Ireland (Eire).
1865: William Butler Yeats is born on June 13 in
Sandymount, Ireland.
1943: Louise Glück is born in New York City.
1889: Robert Browning dies in Venice on the day
that his final volume of verse, Asolando, is published. Browning is buried in Westminster
Abbey.
1950: Marie Howe is born in Rochester, New York.
1892: Alfred, Lord Tennyson dies on October 6
and is buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminister
Abbey.
1952: Rita Frances Dove is born in Akron, Ohio.
1893: William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is published.
1902: James Langston Hughes is born in Joplin,
Missouri.
1923: Wislawa Szymborska is born in Kornik in
western Poland on July 2.
1923: William Butler Yeats receives the Nobel
prize for literature.
1924: Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variations” is
published.
1927: William Stanley (W. S.) Merwin is born on
September 30 in New York City.
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1943: James Tate is born in Kansas City, Missouri.
1951: Joy Harjo is born in May in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
1957: Li-Young Lee is born in Jakarta, Indonesia.
1963: Sylvia Plath commits suicide on February
11, a month after her autobiographical novel of
a nervous breakdown, The Bell Jar, was published.
1967: Langston Hughes dies of congestive heart
failure on May 22 in New York City.
1971: Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying” is published
posthumously.
1971: W. S. Merwin receives the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry for The Carrier of Ladders.
1972: Wislawa Szymborska’s “Astonishment” is
published.
1980: Rita Dove’s “Geometry” is published.
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L i t e r a r y
C h r o n o l o g y
1982: Sylvia Plath receives the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry for Collected Poems.
1984: Mary Oliver receives the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry for American Primitive.
1986: James Tate’s “Smart and Final Iris” is published.
1986: Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is published.
1987: Marie Howe’s “What Belongs to Us” is published.
1987: Rita Dove receives the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Thomas and Beulah.
1988: W. S. Merwin’s “The Horizons of Rooms”
is published.
x v i
1990: Li-Young Lee’s “For a New Citizen of These
United States” is published.
1992: James Tate receives the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Selected Poems.
1993: Louise Glück receives the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry for The Wild Iris.
1996: Wislawa Szymborska receives the Nobel
prize for literature.
1997: Adrienne Rich’s “Rusted Legacy” is published.
1999: Louise Glück’s “The Mystery” is published.
2000: Joy Harjo’s “Anniversary” is published.
P o e t r y
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S t u d e n t s
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book
and magazine publishing companies for assisting
us in securing reproduction rights. We are also
grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library,
the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit
Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/
Kresge Library Complex, and the University of
Michigan Libraries for making their resources
available to us. Following is a list of the copyright
holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Poetry for Students
(PfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let
us know.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS,
VOLUME 15, WERE REPRODUCED FROM
THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS:
Grand Street. Reproduced by permission.—
Modern Language Studies, v. 14, Summer, 1984
for “Return to ‘la bonne vaux’: The Symbolic Significance of Innisfree,” by C. Stuart Hunter. Copyright, Northeast Modern Language Association
1984. Reproduced by permission of the publisher
and author.—Studies in Browning and His Circle,
v. 7, 1979 for “‘That Moment’ in ‘Porphyria’s
Lover,’” by Steven C. Walker; v. 14, 1986 for
“Browning’s Use of Vampirism in ‘Porphyria’s
Lover,’” by Michael L. Burduck; v. 22, May, 1999
for “Porphyria Is Madness,” by Barry L. Popowich.
V o l u m e
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Copyright Baylor University, Armstrong Browning
Library, 1979, 1986, 1999. All reproduced by
permission of the publisher and the authors.—
Victorian Poetry, v. 23, Autumn, 1985 for “The
Quest for the ‘Nameless’ in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady
of Shalott,’” by Ann C. Colley; v. 30, AutumnWinter, 1992 “‘Cracked from Side to Side’: Sexual Politics in ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” by Carl
Plasa. © West Virginia University, 1985, 1992.
Both reproduced by permission of the authors.—
Western Humanities Review. © University of
Utah. Reproduced by permission.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS,
VOLUME 15, WERE REPRODUCED FROM
THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:
Dove, Rita. From The Yellow House on the
Corner. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989.
Copyright (c) 1980 by Rita Dove. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Glück,
Louise. From Vita Nova. The Ecco Press, 1999.
Copyright © 1999 by Louise Gluck. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Harjo, Joy.
From A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Copyright ©
2000 by Joy Harjo. All rights reserved. Reproduced
by permission.—Howe, Marie. From The Good
Thief. Persea Books, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by
Marie Howe. All rights reserved. Reproduced by
permission.—Hughes, Langston. From The Weary
Blues. Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. Copyright 1926 by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. Repro-
x v i i
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
duced by permission.—Tate, James. From Reckoner. Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Copyright
© 1986 by James Tate. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
APPEARING IN PfS, VOLUME 15, WERE
RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING
SOURCES:
Atomic explosion, photograph. UPI/CorbisBettmann. Reproduced by permission.—Browning, Robert (leaning on left hand, in dark, formal
clothes), photograph. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Dove, Rita, photograph.
AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Geese flying in formation, photograph.
UPI/Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.—Glück, Louise, photograph. AP/Wide
World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Harjo,
Joy, holding a saxophone, photograph by Hulleah
Tshinhnahjinnie. Reproduced by permission.—
x v i i i
Hughes, Langston, photograph. The Bettmann
Archive/Newsphotos, Inc./Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.—Merwin, W. S., photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by
permission.—Oliver, Mary, and Paul Monette, National Book Awards, New York, November 18,
1992, Photo by Mark Lennihan. AP/Wide World
Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Plath, Sylvia,
photograph. The Library of Congress.—Rich,
Adrienne, Chicago, Illinois, 1986, photograph.
AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Szymborska, Wislawa, photograph by Filip
Miller. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by
permission.—Tate, James, photograph. Reproduced by permission.—Tennyson, Alfred, Lord,
photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced
by permission.—Yeats, William Butler, photograph by Martin Vos. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Contributors
Adrian Blevins: Blevins is an essayist and poet
who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet
Briar College, and in the Virginia Community
College system. Original essays on The Mystery and What Belongs to Us.
Pamela Steed Hill: Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals,
and is an editor for a university publications department. Entries on Anniversary, For a New
Citizen of These United States, The Mystery, and
Wild Geese. Original essays on Anniversary, For
a New Citizen of These United States, The Mystery, Rusted Legacy, and Wild Geese.
David Kelly: Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College and an associate professor of
literature and creative writing at College of
Lake County and has written extensively for
academic publishers. Entries on Geometry, The
Horizons of Rooms, and The Lady of Shalott.
Original essays on For a New Citizen of These
United States, Geometry, The Horizons of
Rooms, and The Lady of Shalott.
Judi Ketteler: Ketteler has taught literature and
composition. Original essays on Anniversary
and Geometry.
Uma Kukathas: Kukathas is a freelance writer and
editor. Entries on Astonishment, Dream Vari-
V o l u m e
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ations, Porphyria’s Lover, and Rusted Legacy.
Original essays on Astonishment, Dream Variations, Porphyria’s Lover, and Rusted Legacy.
Carl Mowery: Mowery holds a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University and has written extensively for The Gale Group. Original essay on
Blackberrying.
Wendy Perkins: Perkins teaches American and
British literature and film. Original essays on
Astonishment, The Horizons of Rooms, and
Wild Geese.
Ryan D. Poquette: Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about
various forms of literature. Original essays on
Dream Variations and Smart and Final Iris.
Mary Potter: Potter is a writer of fiction and
screenplays. Original essay Wild Geese.
Chris Semansky: Semansky is an instructor of
English literature and composition whose essays, poems, and stories regularly appear in
journals and magazines. Entries on Blackberrying, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Smart and
Final Iris, and What Belongs to Us. Original
essays on Blackberrying, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Smart and Final Iris, and What Belongs to Us.
x i x
Anniversary
Joy Harjo’s “Anniversary” is a “creation” poem—
that is, it attempts to recount how the world began
and when humankind came to be. It is included in
the aptly titled collection Map to the Next World,
but it differs from many other poems in this book
in that its themes and language are not as pessimistic and they do not center on human cruelty.
Published in 2000, on the brink of a new millennium, and subtitled “Poetry and Tales,” Map to the
Next World takes readers through stories, in both
prose and verse, of America’s brutal history, the
long suffering of Indians, and memories of the
poet’s own bitter past. However, some of the poems in this collection offer hope for a better future
and describe the miracles of human nature instead
of its brutality. “Anniversary” is one of these.
The title of this poem is indicative of its celebratory premise, for anniversaries are typically considered happy occasions. Yes, humans also mark the
sad dates of the deaths of loved ones or of national
tragedies with the same word—the anniversary of
the assassination of John Lennon, for instance—but
more often an anniversary is a measurement of time
for a pleasant event. Harjo, of course, cannot specify exactly which anniversary this is for the human
race. That debate has been going on among theologians and scientists for centuries. She treats the
number, no matter what it is, as relatively insignificant. The last line of the poem reads simply, “And
it’s been years.” But the rest of the poem—with descriptions of flames and crows, smoke and “a spiral of gods,” fish and “waving grass”—makes it
V o l u m e
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Joy Harjo
2000
1
A n n i v e r s a r y
was half Cherokee and half Irish, adding another
level to an already complicated heritage.
Joy Harjo
very clear that there is nothing insignificant at all
about the story the poem tells.
Author Biography
Joy Harjo was born in May 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is typically considered a Native American poet, and this is the part of her ancestry with
which she identifies most closely. Harjo’s birth
name, however, was Joy Foster, and between her
mother and father, she can claim Creek and Cherokee Indian, African American, Irish, and French
heritage. She is an official member of the Muscogee tribe of the Creek Nation, and much of her
poetry derives themes from growing up with a
mixed ancestry, never feeling that she was fully accepted by any race or ethnicity. Her paternal greatgreat-grandfather led the Creek Indians in battles
against Andrew Jackson’s soldiers in the early
nineteenth century, but his daughter, Harjo’s greatgrandmother, married a Baptist minister who was
half African. Harjo’s paternal grandmother, Naomi
Harjo, was of mixed Cherokee and French blood,
and this is the woman from whom Joy would take
her own surname at the age of nineteen. On her
mother’s side of the family, Harjo’s grandmother
2
Harjo’s childhood was tumultuous, as her father was both physically and emotionally abusive
to the family. A full Creek Indian, he worked as a
mechanic for a major airline and spent his free time
drinking heavily and having extramarital affairs.
Harjo recalls episodes when her father beat her
mother severely and even brought home his lovers.
When her parents finally divorced, however, the
nightmare was far from over. Her mother remarried, and the stepfather was even more abusive than
her real father had been. When Harjo was sixteen,
he threw her out of the house, and she wound up
doing odd jobs to stay alive, including touring with
an all-Indian dance troupe founded by the Institute
of American Indian Arts where she was enrolled.
At seventeen, Harjo gave birth to her first child, a
result of her romance with a fellow student in the
dance troupe, and she eventually returned to Santa
Fe where she enrolled at the University of New
Mexico. Here, she was exposed to contemporary
writers of high caliber, one of whom was Native
American poet Simon Ortiz. Harjo and Ortiz became romantically involved, resulting in a second
child, but the couple split not long after their daughter’s birth. Finally, Harjo received her bachelor’s
degree from New Mexico and then completed a
master of fine arts at the University of Iowa. By
that time, she was writing and publishing poetry
with some success.
Harjo spent her career teaching at various universities out West before accepting tenure at the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. To
date, she has published six volumes of poetry, including the recent Map to the Next World, which
contains the poem “Anniversary.” A versatile artist,
she also plays saxophone in her band, “Poetic Justice.” Harjo now makes her home in Hawaii, but
she still travels frequently to the American mainland to spend time with her children, grandchildren,
and other relatives, all of whom figure heavily into
her poetry.
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allusion to this theory. When the big bang explosion occurred, it sent the condensed matter and energy expanding in all directions, eventually collecting into clouds that began to condense and
rotate, forming the forerunners of galaxies. Harjo
depicts this agitation of the universe’s ingredients
as “something fermented.” The “question / of attraction” she mentions alludes to the big bang theory’s explanation of how stars were formed. According to the big bang theory, changes in pressure
within the newly formed galaxies caused gas and
dust to form distinct clouds. If there was sufficient
mass and adequate force within the clouds, gravitational attraction would have caused some of them
to collapse. If the mass of material was sufficiently
compressed, a star would form from the resulting
nuclear reactions. While “something sweet” may
not figure into the scientific explanation of the universe, it does add an optimistic flare for the poetic
explanation.
Lines 4–6
Poem Summary
Line 1
The first line of “Anniversary” asks a question
that the remainder of the poem answers. The last
word, “this,” refers to what is about to be described.
Notice that the speaker—Harjo herself, it is safe to
assume—does not imply that she can explain how
the world began nor why, but only what it was like
as it developed.
Lines 2–3
These lines contain description that serves both
as pure poetics and as an allusion to scientific theory. Harjo describes the origin of the universe as
“A little flame illuminating a rough sea.” This is
not only poetical, but also refers to the big bang
theory, which contends that all the matter and energy in the universe today was once condensed in
an extremely small, infinitely hot mass. Line 3,
which is just as poetic when read as is, is also an
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Poetic license allows writers to fudge a bit on
reality without being held accountable for scientific
accuracy. In these lines, Harjo jumps ahead in the
evolution of the universe, saying that at this point
“a bird or two were added,” including “the crow of
course to / joke about humanity,” and another bird
not specifically identified, but that must be one
most people would consider “beautiful.” The description of the crows is an allusion to the legendary
reputation of the black birds—often interchangeable with ravens, in folklore—which portrays them
as evil-filled beasts who enjoy the suffering of human beings. In some Native American myths,
crows have the supernatural power to predict death,
and myth has it that if the shadow of the black bird
crosses you while it is in flight, you will soon die.
The hapless crow was probably destined for such
a dubious distinction in human terms simply because of its caw. The high-pitched cry often sounds
like a person’s shrill laugh, and when a group of
them call out from the branches of trees, the noise
resembles a cacophony of mad laughter.
The imagery in line 6 is worth noting. Apparently the beauty of the second type of bird was so
great that human sight is indebted to it. Just the
songs of these magnificent creatures paved the way
for “our eyes [to] be imagined.”
Lines 7–8
Line 7 implies that by this time, at least the
seeds of what would become the human race were
planted in the story of the universe. Simply stated:
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A n n i v e r s a r y
Lines 14–15
Media
Adaptations
• Harjo recorded her poetry collection The
Woman Who Fell from the Sky in 1994. It is
available on cassette from audiobooks.com and
from www.amazon.com, as of this writing.
“we were then.” But originally nothing existed as
a free, individual entity, and, so, “there was no separation” between humans and the stars, planets,
galaxies, or any matter that spun together in space.
Only after the Earth itself came into being, giving
birth to marvelous vegetation, oceans and rivers,
and mountains and canyons formed from the furious throes of her survival—all together, the “cries
of a planet”—could “our becoming” be possible.
Lines 9–10
Line 9 follows from line 6, confirming the creation of human eyes. As the Earth settled down after its chaotic growing pains, “We peered through
the smoke” now sporting at least shoulders and lips,
or perhaps that is all that was visible as humans
“emerged from new terrain.”
These two lines are probably the most ambiguous, if not unexplainable, in the poem. Just
who it is that is supposed to “Move over” is not
identified, but perhaps it is the aforementioned gods
who, presumably, already know the answers to the
questions that humans continue to wrestle with.
Then again, perhaps the speaker is telling the fretful humans to give it a rest, so to speak—to allow
the rest of “us” to wait until “the dust settles” before taking on worries that cannot be resolved anyway. Whatever the interpretation here, the sentiment seems to support a more relaxed approach to
deep questions, as opposed to heated arguments and
fruitless speculation.
Lines 16–19
Harjo, of course, recognizes that relaxation seldom goes hand in hand with such a controversial
subject, and line 16 testifies to it. Here she admits
that whatever was next in line for creation “is open
to speculation or awe.” Alluding to the argument
that every animal, including man, derived from
aquatic creatures that ventured from the sea to dry
land, the poet describes a “shy fish who had known
only water” before leaving the ocean to evolve into
earth-dwelling mammals. Line 19 intentionally
downplays the millions of years actually necessary
for such evolutionary transformations to take place.
Perhaps to emphasize the human inability to comprehend such vast amounts of time, Harjo infers
that the fish’s sprouting legs, learning to walk, and
essentially growing into every subsequent being
known today happened “just like that.”
Lines 11–13
Here the poem becomes more philosophical
than descriptive. This stanza returns to the notion
of “attraction,” but now it comments on the ongoing, unanswerable questions of creation that, when
asked, only lead to more questions instead of solutions. Lines 12 and 13 contain the first mention
of a deity’s presence in the origins of the universe,
but note that Harjo does not refer to “God” but to
“gods.” This is in keeping with the belief system
of many Native American tribes (as well as other
ethnic groups) that there are different gods for different things. When the human mind ponders too
long the mysteries of the universe and human life,
it can become confused or turn into “a spiral,” going round and round with the debate between creation and evolution. Perhaps the agitated intellect
travels “toward the invention of sky” because that
is where many deities, including the fundamental
Christian God, is thought to live.
4
Lines 20–21
These two lines refer to the familiar food chain
of living beings. As evolution developed, so developed one species’s dependence upon another.
Here, frogs dream of eating flying insects and the
insects dream of mounds of dirt in which to build
nests and create more insects.
Lines 22–23
Lines 22 and 23 draw a connection between
the primitive food chain and human life. As frogs
and insects grew in number and in intelligence, relatively speaking, they paved the way for human intelligence, which would eventually provide a network of human inventions, such as houses. Note
that the network here, or the “web,” is “tangled,”
an allusion to the saying, “Oh what a tangled web
we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” from
Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, canto vi, stanza 17.
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Lines 24–25
“Anniversary” ends on a purely poetic note,
summing up the “manner” in which “we became”
the human race. One may not usually think of fire
as elegant, but here it suggests that the explosive
beginnings of the universe resulted in the remarkable creation of humankind. On a gentler note,
“we” also derived from “the waving grass”—
perhaps only a soft metaphor to portray the human
connection to all living things, including plants as
well as planets. Line 25 seems somewhat anticlimactic after a poem full of scientific, historic, and
poetic description, but actually the understatement
is quite effective. Sometimes when the real amount
of something is too vast to be comprehensible—
whether it is the number of years since the universe
began or the distance of its expansion—one is left
only with a humble admission of the greatness.
“And it’s been years” acknowledges the human inability to understand, but to appreciate nonetheless.
Themes
While there is a hint of speculation in nearly
every depiction of the universe’s unfolding, the
most obvious display of the human mind transcending nature is in the fourth stanza. Here, the
poet asserts that “The question mark of creation attracts more questions / until the mind is a spiral of
gods strung out way over / our heads.” In the next
stanza, she acknowledges that humankind may not
yet fully understand the makings of the world but
there is at least a chance that “we can figure this
thing out.” Note that there is no apparent stress or
frustration in the mind’s search for answers, and
there is no friction between the intellectual transcendence beyond nature and nature itself. Instead,
they work in harmony, confirming the notion that
the human being is always a part of everything that
has ever existed and that everything that has ever
existed is a part of the human being.
The World in Motion
Remembrance and Transcendence
As a poet who identifies herself most significantly with her Native American heritage, Harjo’s
themes often reflect the essence of Indian mythology and beliefs in the human connection to the entire world of matter. Much of her work is based on
the premise that even as an individual person living in the present day, she is still a part of the history of the human race, the history of animals and
vegetation, even the history of planets and stars.
Only by realizing and accepting this philosophy of
interconnectedness can one both salute the past
simply by remembering it and, at the same time,
allow the mind to transcend the natural world without dispelling its beauty and importance.
In “Anniversary,” one may view the entire
piece as a work of remembrance. From the very
first phrase—“When the world was created”—to
the poem’s final line—“And it’s been years”—
Harjo takes the reader on a fanciful trip through
time. Mixing scientific allusions with intriguing
metaphors, she celebrates the creation of the world
from a positive perspective, with only one little
cynical remark thrown in about the purpose of
crows: “to / joke about humanity.” The poem is
consistent throughout with descriptions of how the
natural world developed, from stars and galaxies to
birds and fish to, finally, humankind. But nature
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does not exist in a vacuum here. Rather, the human
mind developed an ability to go beyond the physical world—to imagine, to dream, to think—and,
so, the act of transcendence is also celebrated in
the poem.
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Another theme common in Harjo’s poetry and
prose is the idea of a world that is constantly in
motion. The universe is always moving outward,
stars and planets continue to spin, oceans come and
go with the tide, rivers never stop flowing, vegetation sprouts up and grows all over the earth, animals stay mobile to survive, and humans have created a world for themselves that frowns upon idle
time and stopping to smell the roses, so to speak.
“Anniversary” reflects this world-in-flux notion as
the settings and subjects shift throughout, sometimes subtly, sometimes abruptly, but always exhibiting movement.
Between the first and second stanzas, the scene
shifts from the initial explosion of “A little flame
illuminating a rough sea” beginning the universe to
the presence of birds in the world. Just as quickly,
the third stanza reverts to the “cries of a planet”
and then jumps to the formation of human shoulders and lips. As the poem moves into and out of
its more philosophical mid-section, it emerges into
“The shy fish who had known only water” which,
in turn, emerges from the ocean onto dry land “just
like that, to another life.” From the first sea creature that sprouted legs and became earth-dwelling,
the poem moves to a close as frogs and insects populate the world alongside humans and all their possessions, including “houses on the tangled web.”
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Write an essay defending your idea of how the
universe began. Tell how you arrived at your
conclusion and how you feel about the “other
side.”
• Are there any popular legends or myths associated with your culture, ethnic group, or religion?
Describe one in an essay and tell how you think
it originated and why it has lasted over the years.
• Choose another Native American poet, male or
female, and compare his or her work to Harjo’s.
Are there similar themes or subjects? How are
the styles alike and how do they differ? If you
have a preference for one over the other, tell why
and give examples from the poems.
• Joy Harjo has sometimes called the English language her “enemy.” What do you think she
means by this and how do you think it affects
the poetry she writes, if at all?
profound descriptions and even esoteric wording to
complement the issue? Not necessarily. The simple, direct language actually enhances the idea that
this is a celebration poem, not a scientific treatise
on the formation of matter and energy. Harjo’s
story is uncluttered and natural, innocent in its presentation. She does not avoid the almost childlike
depictions of “A little flame,” “something sweet,”
“a bird or two,” “The shy fish,” “meals of flying
things,” and the final, anticlimactic line, “And it’s
been years.” The guileless, unpretentious language
discloses the poet’s take on something as huge,
complex, and mind-boggling as the origin of life:
it can be pondered, appreciated, and enjoyed by
everyone on earth, not just astronomers, physicists,
and geniuses.
The most visible aspect of the poem’s construction, of course, is the extra spacing between
lines, giving it a loose, open feel and perhaps reflecting the unconstrained meandering of the subject. On the other hand, the skipped lines may emulate the poem’s constant shift from one time
period to another, one world to another, even one
consciousness to another. Whatever Harjo had in
mind with its presentation on the page, “Anniversary” looks as clean, clear, and unhindered as the
language it contains.
Historical Context
Just as remembrance and transcendence work harmoniously together, so do all the wheels spinning
continuously throughout the physical universe and
within human minds. Harjo seems not to see a need
to stop the motion of the world, but to recognize
it, celebrate it, and move on.
Style
Free Verse
Harjo’s “Anniversary” is written in a very relaxed, contemporary style of free verse. There is
no intentional rhyme or set meter, and there is very
little alliteration (like-sounding consonants and
vowels placed close together to create a rhythmic
sound). One may expect the simplicity of the language to conflict with the complexity of the subject matter, and, yet, just the opposite is true. An
attempt to record the creation of the universe and
humankind in a twenty-five-line poem seems
daunting anyway, but should it not at least require
6
Throughout the documented history of mankind,
human beings have handed down creation stories
from generation to generation, from the writings of
what would become major religions to the lesserknown mythologies and legends passed through
small sects of ethnic groups and tribes of native
peoples. How much the story of the universe told
in “Anniversary” was influenced by Harjo’s Creek
Indian heritage is not readily apparent, but it is
likely that the Native American connection to nature and to the past, as well as the present and future, play a key role in the poem’s composition.
Creek Indians belong to any of nineteen tribal
groups that once occupied what are now Alabama
and Georgia. Today, there are around 20,000
Creeks, most of whom live in Oklahoma, where
Harjo was born. Like other Indian tribes in the
early days of American history, the Creeks wound
up in a region different from the one in which they
had settled because of force, not choice. Since at
least the mid-1500s, they had been successful
farmers, dividing their land and members into
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about fifty settlements in the deep south, called
Creek Towns. Eventually, a Creek Confederacy
was formed, and it began to grow in power as Indian tribes that had been chased from their homelands by Europeans joined the Creeks. During the
early 1800s, the Creeks battled Andrew Jackson’s
troops but were outnumbered and worn down over
the years. In the 1830s, the government forced the
Creeks to move to Indian territory in what is now
Oklahoma. There, they faced poverty and starvation as they struggled to develop crops and farming methods that agreed with their new land and
climate. It was a struggle that many of their descendants still live with today.
The population of Native Americans in the
United States has increased by more than 40 percent in the past twenty years, although this group
still comprises less than 1 percent of the total U.S.
population. More than half all of Native Americans
live in major cities, particularly New York,
Chicago, and Los Angeles, but most reside in the
poor sections of those towns. Traditionally, many
Native Americans travel back to their reservations
each year and some return permanently. All too often, they find the natural environment of the reservation disrupted by industrialization. From oil well
drilling and natural gas extraction to coal mines and
hydroelectric plants, once sacred grounds now bear
the resource burdens of energy-seeking consumers
and corporations.
Despite the intrusion of industry onto Indian
reservations, recent years have seen an increase in
sympathy for Native American causes from both
the general population and the government. In the
late 1970s, the American Indian Policy Review
Commission campaigned for greater Native American sovereignty in the United States and for the
past two decades that sovereignty has been growing. The number of federally recognized tribes
reached 547 by the mid 1990s and more than 100
other tribes were petitioning for recognition.
Although the increase in self-governance and
a greater support for Indian issues have been beneficial to this population in general, Native Americans are still the poorest ethnic group in America.
In the early 1990s, 31 percent lived at the poverty
level, and, on reservations, the typical yearly income for a household was $13,000, with unemployment sometimes reaching as high as 80 percent. The establishment of gambling casinos on
many reservations has helped bring capital to the
participating tribes, and there are now more than
seventy Indian nations running casinos on their
land. Today, the Native American gaming industry
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is worth some six billion dollars. It is a mistake,
however, to think that gambling is the only form
of economic enterprise occurring on Indian reservations. Other endeavors include building and selling mobile homes, growing cotton, assembling
parts for automobiles, and maintaining resorts, to
name just a few.
While many Indian students attend high
schools and colleges among the general population,
there are now more than twenty-five NativeAmerican-run colleges and junior colleges, most in
the northern Great Plains states. Over 13,000 students attend these tribal colleges where the emphasis is on Indian traditions and values, as well as training for jobs in today’s world of technology, industry,
and communications. Of course, a young Indian does
not have to attend classes to learn about or to appreciate his or her own heritage, for respecting one’s
origins is a built-in part of Native American culture.
Harjo was schooled at both the Institute of American Indian Arts and at public universities, but her
work consistently reflects the values of NativeAmerican culture. The origins she addresses in “Anniversary” are not personal, but universal—an issue
that has likely caused greater upheaval in non-Indian
populations than within tribes whose belief systems
can account for spirituality and naturalism without
turmoil and controversy.
The old rift between creationists and evolutionists has closed slightly in recent years. Many
proponents on each side have begun to accept that
the two seemingly polar-opposite ideologies may
not be so far apart after all. Often called “scientific
creationists,” these folks in the middle of the road
tend to agree that there is a supreme being responsible for the very beginning of energy, matter, and
life, and they also agree on two points concerning
evolution: 1) there has been “change through time”
in certain lines of organisms, and 2) organisms do
undergo changes during their lifetimes. But there
is disagreement among scientific creationists concerning major groups of organisms giving rise to
other groups, known as “macroevolution.” Some
claim that macroevolution violates the Biblical notion of “kinds,” which has been loosely interpreted
as “species.”
Questions regarding the origins of the universe
and life itself will likely remain unresolved, but that
does not mean the human mind will stop pondering them. For even though “The question mark of
creation attracts more questions,” it seems inevitable that human beings were made—by whatever means—to keep asking.
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Critical Overview
Harjo’s poetry has been warmly received by both
scholars and general readers alike. Most praise her
ability to convey rich traditions of Native American culture and history—the horrible alongside the
beautiful—in such honest, yet elegant, language.
Her themes of nature, of interconnectedness, and
of movement may not be considered original, but
how she deals with them in poetic form is always
admirable. In the introduction to Harjo’s collection
of interviews called The Spiral of Memory, fellow
Native American poet Laura Coltelli writes that in
Harjo’s poetry
the sense of the perennial movement from one place
to the other . . . is not the senseless wandering of the
uprooted, but instead traces an itinerary that bears a
deep identification with the land, a geography of the
remembered earth.
In her brief biography of the poet simply titled
Joy Harjo, Rhonda Pettit describes Harjo’s frequent and well-done use of mysticism in some of
her poems: “Characteristics of Native American
spirituality and orature feed this mysticism—
boundaries between the physical and spiritual
world dissolve; animate and inanimate objects are
interconnected and sacred; time ceases to be linear.” Although this comment was published two
years before Harjo’s book containing “Anniversary,” it is easy to see how well Pettit’s description
applies to this poem as well.
Further testament to Harjo’s acceptance into
both Native American and mainstream literary circles is the number of awards and honors she has
received over the past twenty-five years. Appropriately, just over twenty-five, including an Academy of American Poetry Award and a first-place
poetry award from the University of New Mexico,
both in 1976; an American Indian Distinguished
Achievement Award in 1990; an American Book
Award in 1991; and a presidential appointment to
the National Council on the Arts in 1998.
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor
for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill suggests that Harjo’s poem stops
short of describing a totally pantheistic view of the
universe, leaving room for theism and even atheism.
8
Not everyone who claims to follow the tenets
of pantheism would describe the principles of this
“religion” in the same way. Not all of them would
even call it a religion. In general, however, pantheism holds that the universe is the ultimate reality and the ultimate object of reverence, as opposed
to the belief in a personal God found in most traditional theistic religions. As such, the universe
represents a unity of all things—a totality of which
everything in nature is an inseparable part, including human beings. Most pantheists do not consider themselves either theists or atheists. Theism
not only acknowledges a personal God who is separate from the natural world, but also contends that
God is similar to a human being but with supernatural powers and an omniscient presence. Pantheists do not believe in a deity that is in any way
like a person, but they are still not atheists because
the godlike principles they attribute to the universe
contradict a belief in no God, or gods, at all. Today, however, a new faction of pantheism has
cropped up called “scientific” or “natural” pantheism. In this modern form, followers still revere
the universe and nature but they do not attribute
deistic powers to it.
So how does all this figure into Joy Harjo’s
“Anniversary” poem, which seems very simple,
even sweet, in its subject matter and presentation?
Because her background is Native American and
because many Indian principles and beliefs center
around a tremendous respect for nature and a human connection to all natural things, some readers
may be tempted to tag the poem pantheistic and let
it go at that. Truly, Harjo employs many of the
facets of pantheism in “Anniversary,” but she
leaves open the door to other religions, or nonreligions, denying the poem any single category of
philosophical thought.
First, consider the descriptions that seem most
pantheistic in nature. After opening with a
metaphor reflecting evolution theory, the big bang
in particular, the poem shifts quickly to the origins
of humankind. But even though the seeds of humanity are present (“we were then”), the interconnectedness of all living matter is so strong that
“there was no separation” between the stuff of
galaxies and stars and the stuff of human beings.
As a gradual detachment begins to take place, people, or people-like creatures, emerge “from new terrain,” but the transformation into distinct living beings—whether birds, fish, flowers, insects, or
humans—does not imply that a complete split ever
occurs. Instead, the connection is still very vibrant,
and the sense of sacredness that pantheists feel for
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nature and the universe derives from the inseparable bond among all living matter.
In its entirety, “Anniversary” could be viewed
as primarily pantheistic. But one must be careful
when attempting to categorize something that is not
wholly in keeping with a specific doctrine or belief
system. The notion of “a spiral of gods strung out
way over / our heads” could simply be a metaphor
for stars, planets, galaxies, and so forth that reside
high above the Earth and that have godlike qualities for the pantheist. But, considering that this
phrase directly follows the acknowledgement that
“The question mark of creation attracts more questions,” one may also view it as an acceptance that
the “gods” are separate from the universe as well as
from humankind. There is a clear admission that
neither the poet nor anyone else has the answers to
the questions of creation, and, so, pantheism is not
necessarily the end-all belief in this poem. Perhaps
the most telling words here are “way over / our
heads,” for, figuratively speaking, that may be the
best way to explain the inability of the human mind
to comprehend the world’s beginnings.
Another example of the ambivalence of religious theory in “Anniversary” is the admission in
the fifth stanza that the human race is still trying
to “figure this thing out.” This makes it clear that
confusion continues and that there are still questions that need to be answered. This, in turn, means
that no one belief system has yet satisfied the storyteller in the poem. Indeed, the “story” is still just
that—a tale of possibilities, sometimes following
the tenets of pantheism and sometimes contradicting it.
Probably the most revealing line in this poem
regarding its religious, and non-religious, nature is
at the beginning of the sixth stanza: “What was created next is open to speculation or awe.” If one
speculates or reflects on a topic, it is the human
mind that is at work—pondering, questioning, reasoning, and so on. No religious thought is necessary to think rationally about something and to
reach a conclusion, even one based on inconclusive evidence. Therefore, one part of this line seems
to be saying that the evolutionary transformation of
water creatures into land creatures is just an idea
that anyone may consider—theists, pantheists, or
atheists. But when the word “awe” comes into the
picture, so does the notion of God or gods. In its
literal sense, “awe” means a feeling of reverence
and wonder, even fear, inspired by something
mighty and authoritative or extremely beautiful and
gifted. For theists, God is awesome; for pantheists,
the universe is awesome. So this part of the line
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This, in turn, means
that no one belief system
has yet satisfied the
storyteller in the poem.
Indeed, the ‘story’ is still
just that—a tale of
possibilities, sometimes
following the tenets of
pantheism and sometimes
contradicting it.”
suggests that the transformations that took place in
the beginnings of life had a connection to some supernatural power, regardless of whether that power
is separate from or an intrinsic part of the universe.
In short, Harjo leaves open the door for all kinds
of thought: religious fundamentalist, religious pantheist, and non-religious or atheist.
While strict adherents to any one of these belief systems have argued their cases fervently over
countless years, even to the point of violence, the
poem “Anniversary” is neither argumentative nor
provocative. Its tone is one of soft conciliation to
the beauty of nature and the wonders of its creation.
It is likely a work that can be appreciated by readers tied to any philosophy because it is easy to read
into it whatever one wants to see there. This does
not mean that Harjo’s poem is frivolous or vulnerable to misinterpretation. Rather, it seems to welcome all into the celebration of life—a joy that can
be shared regardless of where anyone believes humans came from.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Anniversary,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Judi Ketteler
Ketteler has taught literature and composition.
In this essay, Ketteler discusses the way in which
Joy Harjo departs from a Western way of thinking
about the beginning of time and human thought and
writes out of a developing Native American tradition.
The poem “Anniversary” by Joy Harjo is a creation story, and an alternative way of thinking
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‘Anniversary’ is very
much about a journey
toward a renewal of life,
one that celebrates the past,
the road already traveled.”
about the beginning of time and human existence.
It is “alternative” in that it takes a non-Western approach in its world view. As a Native American
writer, and more specifically, a member of the
Creek tribe, Joy Harjo writes from a marginalized
place in American society, and her voice fills in a
gap in American history. But she is not alone: Harjo
is working out of a rich Native American literary
tradition. She taps into the common thread of memory, which is central to the survival of Creek culture. “Anniversary” tells the story of the beginning
of time, including the creation of all species, animal and human. This poem also theorizes about the
human mind itself—how the human mind conceives of memory, and how human beings and their
memories are rooted in the natural world. In an interview with literary scholar Laura Coltelli, Harjo
speaks about memory: “I also see memory as not
just associated with past history, past events, past
stories, but nonlinear, as in future and ongoing history, events, and stories. And it changes.”
Storytelling is very important in Native American cultures, and the oral tradition has kept the stories, myths, and poems of native peoples vibrant.
In the essay, “An Art of Saying: Joy Harjo’s Poetry and the Survival of Storytelling,” literary critic
Mary Leen remarks: “In oral cultures, storytelling
maintains and preserves traditions. It takes listeners on a journey toward a renewal of life, a common survival theme in Native rituals and ceremonies.” “Anniversary” is very much about a
journey toward a renewal of life, one that celebrates
the past, the road already traveled.
“Anniversary” is one of Harjo’s more recent
poems, from the book A Map to the Next World,
published in 2000. This collection of poems and
essays is very much concerned with ancestry, history, and creating a bridge between the past and the
present. The poem “Anniversary” takes up this
theme as well: it is the story of the past, as it revisits itself upon the future. The title “Anniversary”
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suggests a celebration, and this celebration is habitual, not a day long ago in history forgotten, but
a living memory to be celebrated. The story is still
alive.
The notion that the past recurs is a main tenet
of most Native-American philosophy. Many Native
American cultures organize themselves in a circular way, rather than a linear one. Instead of envisioning a straight line with the past at one end and
the future at the other—which is how the Western
world operates—many non-Western cultures view
history as a circle: the past is revisited on the present, and the spirits of ancestors are ever-present.
Each time a story is told, the memory is recreated.
Mary Leen explains:
Sacred stories were considered factual, and the idea
of history, of past and present and future for indigenous people before contact, was quite different from
the linear, chronological way events are organized in
the Western world.
“Before contact” is generally defined as preColumbus and pre-colonization. Before Western
influence forced itself on indigenous people, there
were hundreds, possibly thousands, of different cultural traditions. While these cultures were varied,
each highly valued their ancestors, and believed the
past to be alive in the present.
The very first line of the poem acts as a sort
of “topic sentence” for the rest of the poem. The
speaker begins with a rhetorical question: “When
the world was created, wasn’t it like this?” The
reader can imagine a storyteller, telling this story
in a communal atmosphere. The tone is very matter-of-fact, almost understated: “A little flame illuminating a rough sea, a question / of attraction,
something fermented, something sweet?” The
question mark suggests the speaker’s inflection is
one of slight uncertainty, as if she wants a response
or an affirmation from her group. The main actor
in this creation drama is nature; the speaker uses
images from the natural world: flame, sea, and
earth—the basic elements. “Fermented” suggests a
long process of preparation and waiting to make
until the perfect moment, the way grapes ferment
to make wine. “Ferment” is also somewhat harsh—
the taste of fermented yeast is harsh to the tongue.
“Something sweet” is thrown in to offset this. The
beginning of the world is not a rushed process; it
is all of the elements working together to bring life
into being at precisely the right moment.
The story continues with the next stanza. More
actors are introduced into the drama. “And then a
bird or two were added, the crow of course to / joke
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about humanity.” Another characteristic of Native
American literature is anthropomorphism—or animals taking on human characteristics. Animals often have special powers and human characteristics
in Native American literature. Richard Erdoes and
Alfonso Ortiz speak about this in their book, American Indian Myths and Legends: “Animals are a
swarming, talkative presence in the folklore of
every Indian tribe. The number of tales in which
they figure should not be surprising, given their major role in Indian mythology and religion.” Different animals hold different significance—the coyote, for example, is often a trickster figure. It’s no
surprise that animals appear in Harjo’s creation
story. Erdoes and Ortiz explain: “We have seen a
number of animals depicted as the creators of the
universe and of the human race, and they freely
move in and out of stories now as tricksters, now
as cultural bringers.” Clearly, animals are on the
level with humans; the crow “jokes” about humanity, suggesting not only that humans are imperfect, but that animals have as much right to inhabit the earth as humans and have an important
role to play in keeping humans balanced.
The first line of the third stanza solidifies this
relationship: “And it was, we were then—and there
was no separation.” This suggests a level of spirituality and connection to the earth and to all living
creatures. People are not masters of the universe,
they are simply part of it. Feminist critic and historian Paula Gunn Allen discusses the reccurrence
of connectedness in Native American literature in
her book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Allen says:
“The sense of connectedness of all things, of the
spiritness of all things, of the intelligent consciousness of all things, is the identifying characteristic of American Indian tribal poetry.” It is as
if all of the species of the earth—plants, animals,
and humans—are in partnership with one another.
The Earth itself, and the seas and elements are all
crucial participants in the partnership as well. This
creation story is different from the Christian creation story as told in Genesis. There is no main actor, no one single hand who sets the world into motion, as God does in Genesis. Rather, all of the life
forces come together to create the world.
Harjo also uses images of the Earth as mother
in the third stanza of “Anniversary”: “The cries of
a planet formed our becoming. / We peered through
the smoke as our shoulders, lips, / emerged from
new terrain.” The reader can imagine a birth taking
place: a baby pushing itself out of its mother, crying as it enters the world, taking its first breaths. So
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Joy Harjo’s 1990 collection In Mad Love and
War won both the Delmore Schwartz Memorial
Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. Some of these poems first appeared in the Anthology of Contemporary Arizona Indian Literature, and they are some of her
most “musical” lyrics, while the subjects are
some of her darkest.
• American Indian Myths and Legends, edited by
Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, first appeared in 1984 and is still one of the most enjoyable, easily read collections of Native American folklore. It is divided into chapters covering
topics from the origins of the planet and people,
through social structure, love, war, and, finally,
death and the afterlife. (The legends have not
been edited and some contain sexually explicit
material.)
• Internationally respected cosmologist John D.
Barrow’s recent publication The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about
the Origins of the Universe (2001) is a must for
anyone interested in keeping current with ideas
in physics and astronomy. In it, Barrow explores
the idea that there is no such thing as “nothing.”
A strong science background is helpful in reading this book.
• From Sand Creek, published in 2000, is the latest poetry and prose collection by Simon Ortiz,
Native American writer and the father of Joy
Harjo’s daughter. His subjects include the violent history of Native Americans as well as personal tragedies combined with hope for a better
life. Throughout the book, Ortiz pairs poems on
one page with historical vignettes, personal
notes, and political comments on the facing
page, making for a very interesting presentation
as well as a good reading.
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A n n i v e r s a r y
it is that humans are born out of the Earth, their
flesh and bone made up of all of the elements. In
the interview with Coltelli, Harjo speaks about the
physical and spiritual connection she feels with the
Earth, and the way in which the Earth is perceived
in feminine terms, as a mother force. An Oklahoma
native, she relates this feeling to her home state. She
says: “I always see Oklahoma as my mother, my
motherland. I am connected psychically; there is a
birth cord that connects me.” While she is speaking
of a specific place—in this case, her homeland of
Oklahoma—this statement can be extended to the
land in general—the land that each tribe holds sacred. The roots of the tribe are located both physically and spiritually on that land. Harjo also addresses the idea of roots in her interview with
Coltelli: “When I speak of roots, I often mean more
than what’s usually conjectured. I consider the place
we all came from, since the very beginning.”
The fourth stanza shifts in tone somewhat.
Each tribe, each culture has its own creation
story—its own system of belief that it uses to explain how the world began and humanity’s relationship to the world. Harjo recognizes this, and
calls attention to human curiosity: “The question
mark of creation attracts more questions / until the
mind is a spiral of gods strung out way over / our
heads, traveling toward the invention of sky.” It’s
as if the speaker is suggesting that to tackle the creation story, to understand cognitively and rationally, is more than the human mind is capable of.
It “spirals” out of control because we cannot come
to any firm conclusion if we try to think scientifically. Yet we are drawn to think in such a manner,
to dissect and theorize and test. This is not a bad
thing. It just requires energy, as the fifth stanza suggests: “Move over and let us sleep until the dust
settles, / until we can figure this thing out.” Understanding how the world came into being isn’t an
overnight thing. People need time to develop their
belief systems. “Why rush?” is the implied rhetorical question. Harjo again uses the same patient,
matter-of-fact tone she began the poem with.
The reader is brought back into storytelling
mode with the sixth stanza. The world is not yet
complete; there is still more wonder to behold, and
also an uncertainty: “What was created next is open
to speculation or awe.” The reader gets the sense
that this story is not set in stone. It evolves with
each telling. Throughout “Anniversary,” many
transformations are described: humans are transformed from dust out of the earth into creatures; the
earth and seas are transformed as well. Animals—
who often take on human characteristics—also un-
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dergo transformations. “The shy fish” suddenly becomes a creature of the land. He walks “out of the
ocean onto dry land, / just like that, to another life.”
Life is changeable, malleable. The animals in the
seventh stanza are much the same: “Frog imagined
meals of flying things and creatures in flight imagined hills.” It’s as if the species are still figuring out
their places. Animals, humans, and plants all seem
to be testing out different identities until they find
the one that suits them best. But no one single
species seems elevated above the others: all are free
to create and recreate themselves. Creation is all part
of the “tangled web”—the powerful image that sits
at the end of the seventh stanza.
“Anniversary” concludes in a very simple, almost nonchalant way: “And in that manner we became—elegance of fire, the waving of grass. / And
it’s been years.” The poem is very much following
the circular narrative style described earlier. Instead
of following the traditional pattern of storytelling,
with a conflict and a resolution, “Anniversary” circles around itself, not prioritizing the end over the
beginning, or vice versa. Events happen as they
happen. Paula Gunn Allen says:
American Indian literature does not rely on conflict,
crisis and resolution for organization . . . Rather, its
significance is determined by its relation to creative
empowerment, its reflection of tribal understanding,
and its relation to the unitary nature of reality.
For Harjo, reality is determined by the past, by
the stories her culture has preserved. In this poem,
people were not put on the earth to dominate and
categorize the species. There is no one main event
that leads up to the moment of creation. Rather,
things happen in relation to one another: there is a
sense of connectedness and interdependence. People are not at the center of the story, and are not
positioned at the center of the world. As such, Native American cultures have a different relationship
to the Earth: the Earth is alive, and in many cases,
it is thought of as female (as is the case in this poem
with the childbirth imagery in the third stanza). In
writing “Anniversary,” Harjo is working within an
established literary tradition that values oral storytelling, the preservation of memories, and a living
relationship with the Earth.
Source: Judi Ketteler, Critical Essay on “Anniversary,” in
Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Allen, Paula Gunn, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Beacon Press, 1986.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
A n n i v e r s a r y
Coltelli, Laura, Introduction to The Spiral of Memory, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
—, Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak,
University of Nebraska, 1990.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths
and Legends, Pantheon, 1984.
Harjo, Joy, Map to the Next World, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2000.
Leen, Mary, “An Art of Saying: Joy Harjo’s Poetry and the
Survival of Storytelling,” in American Indian Quarterly,
Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1995, pp. 1–16.
Pettit, Rhonda, Joy Harjo, Boise State University Western
Writers Series, 1998.
Further Reading
Bruchac, Joseph, and Janet Witalec, eds., Smoke Rising: The
Native North American Literary Companion, Visible Ink
Press, 1995.
This collection of poetry and prose by and about Native Americans is a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in Indian culture. It runs over 400
pages and includes four of Joy Harjo’s poems.
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Harjo, Joy, She Had Some Horses, Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1983.
This early poetry collection by Harjo is one of her
most popular. The title poem is often anthologized,
and the book as a whole is a good introduction to the
Native American themes that run throughout subsequent collections.
—, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, W. W. Norton
and Company, Inc., 1996.
The title of this collection refers to the Iroquoian creation myth about a goddess who falls from the sky.
In Harjo’s poem, however, the goddess becomes a
“strange beauty in heels” who drops through a plate
glass grocery window. It is interesting to compare
this creation story to the one she tells in “Anniversary.”
Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy’s
Language: Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings of North America, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.,
1997.
This is an anthology of work of over eighty Native
American women writers who have recorded their
experiences in poetry, fiction, prayer, and memoir. It
is considered one of the most important contributions
to Native American women’s literature and historical documentation.
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Astonishment
Wislawa Szymborska
1972
Wislawa Szymborska’s “Astonishment,” also
translated as “Wonderment,” is a simple, sixteenline poem in which the poet asks a series of questions about why she exists in this world in the form
that she does. The deeply philosophical poem poses
ten questions about the human self, a person’s place
in the world, and the nature of existence, but it offers no answers to these puzzles. Rather, there is
some suggestion that these metaphysical questions
cannot be answered at all, and that the best response
to the complex and inscrutable world is one of astonishment because the act of asking questions does
not get one closer to unraveling the mysteries of
existence.
Szymborska published the poem in 1972 in
Wszelki wypadek (Could Have), a collection in
which the poet tackles philosophical issues as they
relate to everyday life. Like other pieces in that volume, “Astonishment” is a deceptively simple work
that elicits more questions than it explicitly poses
and makes readers aware of the richness, sadness,
mystery, and dark joy of being human. The straightforward language, commonplace images, and clean
form of the poem work together to create a sense
of an accessible, ordinary world that is nevertheless enormously complex and difficult to understand. As with most of Szymborska’s poetry, little
has been written about “Astonishment,” but the
work is of particular interest because it echoes
many of the remarks made by the poet in her 1996
Nobel lecture. In that speech, the poet talks about
the reaction of astonishment to the unfathomable
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nature of the world. Thus, the poem tackles a subject that is central to the poet’s work, introducing
concerns about what can be known, the nature of
existence, and the status of human beings that figure prominently in her other writings.
Author Biography
Szymborska was born in Kornik in western Poland
on July 2, 1923. In 1931, her family moved to
Krakow. During World War II, when Germany occupied Poland, Szymborska attended school illegally. In March 1945, she published her first poem,
“Szukam slowa” (“I am Looking for a Word”) in
the daily Dziennik Polski. Later that year, she began a course of study in Polish literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,
which she completed in 1948. She also finished
her first collection of poetry that year, but the book
was not published because the ruling Communist
party in Poland found the work too complex and
bourgeois. She revised the work to make it more
political, and it was published in 1952 as Dlatego
zyjemy (That’s What We Live For). Szymborska
was later to disavow the political position she took
in this and other early socialist-realist verse. From
1953 to 1981, Szymborska worked on the Krakow
literary weekly Zycie Literacia (Literary Life) as
poetry editor and wrote a weekly column. Her
columns were later collected in several volumes
under the title Lektury nadobowiazkowe (Optional
Readings).
While she worked at Zycie Literacia, Szymborska’s reputation in Poland grew steadily, although she remained an intensely private person.
She published poetry, won national and international prizes, and traveled abroad to read and discuss her work. She published several slim volumes
of verse during this time, including the 1972 work
Wszelki wypadek (Could Have) in which “Astonishment” first appeared. The collection of twentyseven poems explores the diversity, plenitude, and
richness of everyday life, which for the poet is a
source of astonishment and inspires metaphysical
questions. Like most of her mature work, the poems in the volume are not political and philosophically skeptical in tone.
In 1981, Szymborska resigned from Zycie Literacia and joined the editorial staff of the monthly
magazine Pismo. She continued to write poetry and
essays, translated French poetry, and gained influence in Poland’s literary circle as well as its un-
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Wislawa Szymborska
derground press. In 1991, Szymborska won the
Goethe Prize and in 1995, she was awarded the
Herder Prize and received an honorary doctor of
letters degree from Poznan University. In 1996, she
received the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel
Committee called her work “poetry that with ironic
precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Szymborska has written that winning the Nobel Prize at age seventy-three came as a shock to
her. A shy and self-effacing person, she was uncomfortable at being suddenly thrust into the limelight and besieged by reporters. Although she continues to publish and remains a force in Polish
literary circles, Szymborska shies away from interviews and media attention and lives a quiet life
in Krakow.
Poem Summary
Title
“Astonishment” was written in 1972, but the
main ideas of the poem are echoed in much of Szymborska’s earlier and later work as well. The notion
of “astonishment” or wonderment at the complexity
of the universe is seen in much of her poetry as the
poet looks with curiosity, awe, sadness, and even joy
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A s t o n i s h m e n t
Media
Adaptations
• The Nobel Prize Committee maintains a Szymborska web page at http://www.nobel.se/
literature/laureates/1996/index.html (last accessed January, 2002) with links to other interesting sites.
at the contingency of human existence and the place
humans occupy in the universe. In her 1996 Nobel
lecture, Szymborska talks about inspiration, which
she says is “born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
Poets are not the only ones whom inspiration visits,
she says—inspiration comes to doctors, teachers,
and gardeners as well—but genuine poets must keep
repeating the phrase “I don’t know,” and each poem
marks an effort to try to know, which the poet inevitably finds cannot be satisfactorily done. The poet
looks around at the world, she says, and ultimately
does not know what to think or make of it. The world
is incredible in its vastness, and human beings, as
all animals, are but specks in this “measureless theater.” Human life is laughably short and bounded by
two arbitrary dates of life and death. But, Szymborska says, whatever else humans might think,
know, or not know about this world, “it is astonishing.” And what is interesting is that the world is not
astonishing because it deviates from some norm humans know, but it is simply astonishing per se, even
though there is nothing to compare it with. There is
nothing usual or normal about the world, she says.
It is extraordinary, and poets especially cannot cease
to be amazed by it. The fact that they do not know
adds to this amazement and sense of incredulousness. In “Astonishment,” Szymborska looks closely
at the sense of astonishment she feels as a person
and a poet who “does not know” as she surveys the
seemingly ordinary world and its unfathomable mysteries.
Lines 1–4
The poem takes the form of a series of ten
questions. That there are exactly ten questions gives
the work a sense of formality and order, which is
undercut by the fact that the questions are essen-
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tially unanswerable. From the beginning, as the
questions are posed, the poet refers to herself, but
she only makes this explicit a few times in the
course of the poem. In the first four lines, she asks
a series of “why” questions. She begins by asking
why it is that she is the particular being she is and
not one or all of the others that she could be or
could have been in the universe. Why, she asks in
line 2, is she this specific self? She goes on to wonder why she is a human being who lives in a house
as opposed to, say, a bird in a nest. And why is this
self she occupies “sewn up” in the skin of a human
being rather than the scales of a fish? Why is her
self in a body topped off with a face and not a tree
topped off by a leaf instead?
As the poet asks these questions, however, she
does not refer specifically to herself, humans, birds,
fish, or trees. Rather, she refers to the external
dwellings of the creatures she describes. She asks
why her self is in a house rather than a nest, only
suggesting and not stating explicitly that she is referring to birds and humans. She does not refer to
fish but to “scales,” and talks about a “leaf” but not
a tree. By referring only to the external trappings
of humans and animals, the poet suggests that the
“self” in each of them is in fact not so different.
Each of these creatures is a living being, an existent entity that finds itself in a particular situation,
trapped as it were in a particular body. But there
seems to be no reason—at least that the poet can
decipher—why each of them is confined to or assigned the external body it has received. The poet
does not understand why it has come about that, of
all the possible places it could have been, her self
happens to be housed in the particular human body
she has, or why she is this particular self at all.
Lines 5–9
In the next five lines, the poet asks another series of “why” questions. She moves now from
queries about the specific self she is to questions
about time and place. Why, she asks, is she here at
this very moment? She even specifies the day she
is asking these questions—Tuesday—and wonders
why she is here on this of all days. And not only
that, why is she even on Earth at all? Why is she
“pinned down” by this star’s pin? That is, why is
she bound to this particular planet of all those out
there? The references to the present and a specific
day suddenly personalizes the questions and makes
it clear that it is a particular person posing them.
The poet also for the first time refers to herself explicitly, as she asks why she is on Earth now “In
spite of years of my not being here?” She suggests
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that it seems to be some sort of accident that she
is here. For years she was not, so why is she now?
The universe has gone on for a long time without
her. It is a vast “sea” of time and different fates of
different living things, from cells to heavenly bodies to sea creatures. All these things, with their different forms of existence, were here before, but she
was not. And so, she wonders, why is she now?
Why is she here despite the fact that the universe
has gone on in all its complexity for such a long
time without her?
Lines 10–13
The poet then moves from asking questions
about “why” to questions about “what.” Here she
seems to be looking for an explanation of some
source (perhaps God or other maker, or some more
general creative principle) that made things as they
are. As in the rest of the poem, even as she asks
questions, the poet also reveals to the reader something about what she herself thinks. She asks what
it is that made her appear “neither an inch nor half
a globe too far, / neither a minute nor aeons too
early?” Here she suggests that the fact that she exists is the result of conditions being exactly perfect
for that to happen. The fact that she is herself is
due to her coming into existence precisely where
she did and when she did. The question, then, is
what made this so? That is, what made it happen
that she became her in exactly the way she did?
Even as the poet asks “what” made her “fill” herself “so squarely,” she does not point particularly
to God or some other specific entity, but leaves the
possibilities completely open. It is, she implies, a
complete mystery to her.
Lines 14–16
In the last lines of the poem, the poet reinforces
the fact that her various questions have yielded no
answers. She simply does not know. She does not
even know why she is “staring now into the dark”
and saying the words she is. The image of staring
into the dark emphasizes the poet’s ignorance as
she throws out her various questions with apparently no hope of a response. The image of someone sitting in the dark “now” asking questions also
again reminds readers that the questions are being
posed by a real person with real concerns. The
questions the poet asks are not from the past, are
not “philosophical” in some abstract sense, but are
very real, concrete, and immediate, tackling as they
do real puzzles about daily existence as humans experience them. But the poet says she does not know
why she stares into the dark and mutters this “un-
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ending monologue.” It is unending, of course, because there is an infinite number of questions about
the world and her place in it that she could ask. It
is a monologue because she does not expect any
response from anyone, or to get any answers at all
to her questions. While she has suggested that the
questions are important and constant and pressing,
the poet at the end indicates that they perhaps mean
very little. She compares herself muttering to the
“growling thing we call a dog.” Again, it could be
that what she is saying is that her questions ultimately are as meaningless as the growling sounds
of a dog. It could also mean that the dog too has
similar types of concerns that she does as he goes
about his daily existence. The poet has compared
herself to animals in the beginning of the poem, so
it is likely she does not think of other animals as
being somehow less involved in or part of the complexity of the world. She seems to imply in the last
line that she thinks the articulation of the kinds of
questions she has posed are really no more meaningful than the sounds made by a dog. The question remains as to whether she thinks the growling
of the dog is also an attempt to understand some
of the mysteries of the world. The growling might
indicate fear of the unknown or a sense of unease,
and maybe she is not so different from the “rest”
she refers to in line 1 as she expresses her wonderment about the nature of the world.
Themes
The Inscrutable Mysteries of the World
Szymborska touches on a number of themes in
her sixteen-line poem, but they all center around
the idea of the unfathomable nature of the world in
which humans—and indeed all beings—find themselves. The title of the poem itself, indicating that
a possible reaction to the world when one takes a
moment to think about it is “astonishment,” underscores that it is a place of amazement and wonder. The fact that the poet asks questions that are
not answered (or can even be answered, perhaps),
emphasizes too that the world’s mysteries simply
cannot be penetrated. The poet asks why she is the
creature she is, why she is here now and in this
place, why she suddenly came into existence when
the universe had gone on for such a long time without her, what made the conditions exactly so that
she would come into being, and what made her the
very person she is. After she asks all these questions, she recognizes that there are no answers
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A s t o n i s h m e n t
Topics for
Further
Study
• To what extent do you think the questions the
poet poses in “Astonishment” are unanswerable? Do you think that all such “metaphysical”
questions cannot be answered? What might
some answers be to these questions?
• What are some of the questions you have about
the nature of the world and human existence?
How are they different from or similar to Szymborska’s questions?
• Do you think that human beings are ultimately
not so very different from other animals? Why
or why not?
• Research some of the answers that philosophers,
political thinkers, or religious figures throughout the ages have considered in response to
Szymborska’s questions about the nature of existence.
• Is Szymborska right in saying that poets must
take an attitude that they “don’t know”? What
do you see as potential problems with taking
such a position?
forthcoming, that she is posing these questions into
the darkness. She is not in dialogue with the universe, but simply muttering a monologue to herself.
While the poet asks unanswerable questions
and there is a sense that the mysteries of existence
will always be mysteries, the way the questions are
posed make them seem immediate and important
to everyday human experience. Although the questions are philosophical, they are framed in such a
way that they are not abstract but related to ordinary human life. By using concrete images at the
beginning of the poem—of a house, nest, scales,
skin, a leaf, a face—the poet points out that it is
the most basic, material aspects of life that are a
source of astonishment. By referring to the very
real present (“Tuesday”), the reader is drawn to the
here and now and made to recognize that these
questions are relevant for all people, including one-
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self in this particular moment. Toward the end of
the poem, the poet also looks at the world from a
more distant point of view, surveying the “star” that
is the Earth and considering the grand sweep of
time in which the world has existed. She wonders
in lines 10–13 what made her appear in this world
“neither an inch nor half a globe too far, / neither
a minute nor aeons too early?” Here she compares
vast spaces and times with tiny ones and in doing
so implies that they are both equally mysterious.
Thus, the grand complexity of the world and the
way it appears to humans in “normal” life are similarly inscrutable.
The Contingency of Human Existence
“Astonishment” opens with the poet asking
why she has taken on this particular self and not
some other. Throughout the poem, she wants to
know why she has taken on this specific existence
out of the huge number of possibilities of what she
could have been. She talks about the various beings that populate the world, from birds to trees,
from cells to heavenly bodies and sea creatures. Of
course, she receives no answer to this question. But
the fact that she continues to marvel at the fact of
her existence suggests perhaps that what she—a human in a particular body existing at a particular
time—is merely some accident or chance event. It
did not have to happen that she was filled with herself so squarely. It just so happens that this is the
turn of events that have taken place. She could just
as easily have been a bird or fish or tree, but as it
turned out she is a woman, a poet, saying particular words on a particular Tuesday. Human existence, indeed all existence, then, is something that
merely happens without a plan or reason. Perhaps
it is contingent or accidental that things have turned
out as they have. However, since the poet never actually receives a response to her many questions, it
is not clear that human existence is in fact contingent in this way. It could be that there is a reason
the poet is who she is. There could be a “what,” as
she suggests, that made her appear in exactly the
time and place that she does. With her questions,
then, the poet suggests both that maybe all existence is arbitrary, following no set plan, and also
that there might be an explanation for things being
as they are—it is just that she does not know what
the explanations are since her questions are not being answered.
The Status of the Human Animal
Throughout the poem, the poet compares herself to other living creatures. She wonders why she
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is not a bird, a fish, or a tree but a human being.
At the end of the poem, she likens herself asking
questions to a dog growling. By doing this, she creates a sense that humans are not so different from
the other beings that make up the world. Humans
are different from other creatures in some ways, but
perhaps they arrogantly assume that they are more
different than they actually are. Humans are said to
stand apart from other living creatures because of
their ability to reason. Even this the poet undercuts
at the end of the poem by implying that the questioning or philosophizing she has been engaged in
(using her rational faculties) is not so different from
what a dog is doing as he growls. Both are responses to one’s external environment and an attempt to make sense of it. There is a strong suggestion in the poem that human beings are not so
different or special in the scheme of things, that
they are simply one aspect of and part of this
strange and fascinating world.
Skepticism and Ignorance
By posing a series of questions that are not answered, the poet stresses that she simply does not
know. She asks the most basic questions about human life: why she is here, why she is what she is,
what made her appear here at this very moment.
But she then makes no attempt to provide answers.
The poet portrays herself as ignorant, as she stares
“into the dark” muttering these questions to herself. But she is not merely ignorant of the answers.
There is a very real sense that there are no answers
available at all. The poet is thus not simply ignorant, but she is skeptical that the kinds of questions
she poses can be satisfactorily answered. Even the
way she asks the questions, she finds to be problematic. She has bared herself and asked profound
questions about the nature of herself and the world,
but she feels at the end of the poem that the questions are simply mutterings. It could be that the nature of the world and existence is such that even
the way humans (or other beings) ask questions
about it do not come anywhere close to unraveling
its mysteries.
Style
the original work. However, the most obvious device the poet uses—that of posing a series of questions—is as effective in English as it must be in the
Polish original. The entire poem is simply a series
of questions that are loosely organized around certain broad themes. The poem begins by asking
questions about the specific “self” that occupies the
poet’s body. It then moves to asking questions
about time and place, moving away from the poet’s
particular self to her place in the cosmos as she
shares it with all manner of other creatures. The
poet then turns to asking questions about what
could have made things as they are and what has
made her the very specific person that she is. Finally, she overturns all her previous questions by
asking why she is asking these seemingly meaningless questions at all. As she moves deliberately
through the various questions, the poet builds a
sense of wonder and “astonishment” at the world.
She makes the normal, everyday world seem quite
extraordinary. But then at the end of the poem,
these questions are undercut and even mocked by
the poet herself, who compares them to the growlings of a dog. After posing a series of profound,
metaphysical questions that seem somehow so relevant to human reality, the poet questions the very
act of questioning itself.
The sixteen lines of the poem have a definite
rhyme scheme of aabccbdeedfeefgg. The work is
thus bounded by two rhyming couplets, giving it a
sense of order and symmetry. An impression of order comes too from the fact that the poet moves
slowly and deliberately through her questions,
starting with queries about her self to those about
the Earth and then tackling issues of physical being, time, and space, one by one. The cerebral, reasonable tone also confers a feeling of calm in the
poem; the poet never rails against the universe but
simply asks pointedly and in an extremely rational
manner certain fundamental questions about existence. However, the apparent order and calm suggested by the structure of the poem is contrasted
with the sense of uncertainty generated by the content of the poem, in which answers to the poet’s
questions are not offered and nothing is known. The
poem’s external form seems to suggest that while
things may appear to be one way from the outside,
when considered more closely they are far more
mysterious and complicated.
Form
Because “Astonishment” was originally written in Polish, it is difficult to comment on the subtleties of the poem’s style since some of the techniques in the translation may in fact not apply to
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Language
Szymborska’s poetry is known for its simplicity and spareness of language. The Nobel Committee, when they conferred the Nobel Prize for
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A s t o n i s h m e n t
literature on the poet in 1996, commented on her
“finely chiseled diction.” “Astonishment” is a fine
example of the poet’s art, as she manages to ask
deep metaphysical questions using the most ordinary language and images. Nowhere in the poem
does the reader encounter difficult philosophical
concepts or arcane (known to only a few) references. The images provided are of the things of ordinary existence, including birds, fish, trees, and
cells. The sentences used are terse, with questions
being asked almost in a sort of shorthand to be as
direct as possible. It is extraordinary that in sixteen
simple lines Szymborska manages to probe so
deeply the mysteries of the world. She does this by
using straightforward, accessible language to tap
into readers’ direct experiences as human beings
and thus to draw attention to their strange and wondrous nature.
Historical Context
Polish Politics and Szymborska’s
Literary Career
Szymborska wrote “Astonishment” in 1972, a
period of considerable political tension in Poland.
However, the poem is decidedly apolitical, like
much of Szymborska’s verse. Over her career, despite having lived in a country in which politics has
in many ways defined how people think and live,
the poet has for the most part written poetry that
does not make any overt political statements. This
has brought her criticism from some quarters. But,
as she has expressed both in her 1996 Nobel lecture
and a 1996 interview with Dean Murphy in the Los
Angeles Times, for her to offer political opinions
would be to somehow indicate that she has answers
to certain questions, which she feels she does not.
She says that the mistake that the Communist Party
made, for example, was to think that it had the final answer to the question about an ideal form of
society when it clearly did not. She admits too that
in her early years, she considered that communism’s
“answer” was the right one. Now she looks at the
political verse she wrote in her early years as a mistake, and says that she simply does not have the nature of a political activist. However, says Szymborska, it would be wrong to assume that because
she does not write political poetry that she is not
politically engaged; as she says in her poem “Children of the Age,” “apolitical poems are political
too.” That is, one can write verse that is relevant to
very real human concerns without offering solutions
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in the form of political doctrines. The poet writes
verse in her own style, not making overt claims
about politics and ideologies, making her readers
think by probing with great intensity those ideas that
are fundamental to human life and existence.
From the beginning of her career, politics
played a large role in Szymborska’s life, as it did
in the life of every other Polish citizen. Shortly after the end of World War II, when Szymborska was
a teenager, Poland had emerged as a Communist
state, a “people’s democracy” on the Soviet model.
In 1952, a new constitution was adopted, again
modeled after that of the USSR. Under Communist
rule, there were considerable restrictions on individual liberties, including restrictions on freedom
of expression. For example, when Szymborska
tried to publish her first collection of verse in 1951,
the Communist government deemed it unfit to be
published because it did not adequately reflect the
principles of the Communist state. Like much of
Szymborska’s later work, the poems in the collection were concerned with questions of basic human
existence. When she could not publish the collection, Szymborska revised her work to make it more
political and in line with the Communist philosophy. Dlatego zyjemy (That’s What We Live For),
which reflected the government’s socialist-realist
ideology, was published in 1952. In 1954, Szymborska published another collection, Pytania
Zadawane Sobie (Questions Put to Myself), with
the same political bent.
After the death of the Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin in 1953, there was a move toward greater liberalization. Polish artists, intellectuals, students, and
workers raised demands for government reforms
and a greater measure of freedom from Soviet control. In June 1956, workers staged demonstrations
in Poznan; the quelling of the uprising left fiftythree people dead and several hundred wounded.
One of the results of the demonstration was greater
political freedom, as the government loosened its
control of its citizens. Censorship restrictions were
lifted to some degree, and writers were freer to express their own opinions. In 1957, Szymborska published her third volume of poetry, Wolaanie do Yeti
(Calling Out to Yeti), which was a clear departure
from the verse she had published earlier that praised
the ideology of communism. She disavowed the
ideas in those earlier works, and in her work as an
editor and writer for magazines, she aligned herself
with more liberal thinkers and positions. The 1957
collection also signaled Szymborska’s clear move
away from writing political poetry. Her work in the
1960s continued in this vein.
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Compare
&
Contrast
• Early 1970s: There is heavy censorship in
Poland, but there is a lively literary underground
that publishes banned books.
Today: United States citizens enjoy a greater
degree of freedom of expression than perhaps
any other people, but there is a movement to remove certain books from school shelves because
of supposedly inappropriate content.
• Early 1970s: Social dissatisfaction is rampant,
and there are workers’ strikes all over Poland
that lead to riots, arson, and looting.
In the late 1960s, economic conditions in
Poland became increasingly bad. Social dissatisfaction increased, with demonstrations against the
government and popular calls for greater freedom
and less censorship. In 1968, there were a number
of anti-government demonstrations at universities,
as students demanded greater cultural and individual freedoms. The government responded by repressing liberties even further. Dissatisfaction continued to grow, and in December 1970, there were
a number of workers’ strikes. A week long state of
emergency was declared, and the demonstrations
were put down with the help of military force.
There was considerable loss of life involved. Conditions began to improve in the early 1970s with
another attempt at liberalization, but the ruling
Communist regime continued to have great control
over its citizenry, a situation that would continue
until 1989 when Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first democratically elected leader of Poland, took office.
During these decades of upheaval, Szymborska
continued to write apolitical poetry. The 1972 collection in which “Astonishment” appeared, for example, is highly philosophical in nature and makes
scant reference to the social and political situation
of contemporary Poland. Even if her poetry was not
politically charged, Szymborska was active in the
Polish literary underground and engaged in the
struggle against censorship. She continued to write
poetry that was true to her nature, and perhaps the
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Today: There are demonstrations and riots in
several cities in the United States because of alleged racial profiling and discrimination against
various minorities.
• Early 1970s: The Communist Party is still in
power, but there is a strong movement in Poland
against Communist rule.
Today: The United States has an active
Communist Party that participates in every general election but wins a negligible number of
votes.
greatest political statement of her career is that she
has steadfastly resisted presenting any ideology in
her writing, preferring to use her powers of observation to look at the world and understand it from
a variety of perspectives.
Critical Overview
When Szymborska was informed on October 3,
1996, that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she said that the world “came crashing down
on me.” Until then, the shy and retiring Szymborska
was a well regarded poet who had a loyal following in Poland but who was virtually unknown outside her own country. Almost everyone—in Poland
and abroad—was surprised that one of the world’s
highest literary honors was going to a woman
whose poetic output was so small (she had published only around two hundred poems over her career) and who did not have an impressive international reputation. Those who knew her work,
however, recognized that Szymborska was worthy
of the award. Although she is not a prolific writer,
she has been regarded since the late 1970s as a leading voice in contemporary Polish poetry. Beginning
with her third collection, Wolaanie do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti) in 1957, her reputation grew
steadily and she gained an ever-widening audience
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in Poland. Because of the decidedly apolitical tenor
of her work (at least after some initial attempts at
writing political poetry in the early 1950s), she
drew little attention from Western critics, whose interest in eastern European poetry had a largely political motivation. Most Western critics were interested in a certain type of literature that was being
written “behind the iron curtain,” and Szymborska’s work did not fit the stereotype. A few English translations of her work appeared in the 1980s
and 1990s, but it was not until she won the Nobel
Prize that her work elicited any real interest from
the English-speaking world.
Even then, little has been written about Szymborska’s poetry. The critic Bogdana Carpenter
maintains that the dearth of studies about her work
is, paradoxically, due to “Szymborska’s very simplicity and directness,” which “present the greatest challenge to the critic.” The analytic language
of literary criticism, claims Carpenter, seems powerless and inadequate when dealing with Szymborska’s deceptively transparent verse; it seems
heavy-handed and clumsy in contrast to the poet’s
light and agile lines. Thus, there are only a handful of articles written in English about Szymborska’s poetry, and those tend to be general, dealing with the major themes that reappear in her
work and pointing out the clarity and purity of her
language. There have been no studies devoted exclusively to any poem, including “Astonishment.”
In the few essays devoted to her work, that poem
is only mentioned in passing. Edyta Bojanowska
cites the poem as an example of how far Szymborska’s nature “remains . . . an inscrutable mystery, in the face of which amazement and wonder
are the only appropriate reactions.” And Jonathan
Aaron uses it to show how Szymborska has a tendency to shift the scale in which the events she observes are happening, moving from perspective to
perspective. That critics have not devoted much
time to detailed analyses to this or other poems by
Szymborska is, however, not an indictment of her
work or a commentary on its lack of relevance. As
Szymborska has made clear in the few interviews
she has given, including a Los Angeles Times interview in 1996, she does not like to offer details
of her personal life or beliefs, and she does not like
to talk about and analyze poetry. She prefers her
readers to have a one-to-one relationship with her
poems, and she thinks that poetry should speak for
itself. That Szymborska has won the highest literary honor in the world without the help of critics
to champion or “explain” it, that it is accessible
and moving to readers without critical analysis, is
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perhaps an indication that her poetry does indeed
speak for itself.
Criticism
Uma Kukathas
Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. In
this essay, Kukathas suggests that Szymborska’s
poem has a deeper political message than is immediately apparent.
One of the reasons the world was so surprised
by the announcement in 1996 that Szymborska had
won the Nobel Prize for literature was that her work
is so apolitical. Not that all prize winners in the
past have focused on political issues in their writing, but certainly in the latter part of the twentieth
century, eastern European writers with international reputations have shown a particularly political bent in their work. The Polish writer before
Szymborska to win the prize, and the person most
responsible for the visibility of modern Polish poetry, for example, is the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who
made his name in the West in the 1950s with his
critique of totalitarianism, The Captive Mind. In
that work, Milosz observes that:
In Central and Eastern Europe the word ‘poet’ has a
somewhat different meaning from what it has in the
West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in
beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a
‘bard,’ that his songs linger on many lips, that he
speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the
citizens.
But Szymborska’s work, unlike that of her well
known compatriots, Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert,
Tadeusz Rózecicz, and Miron Bialowszewski, has
defied this model. Or at least, this is the opinion of
most readers of Szymborska’s work. Bogdana Carpenter, for example, states that Szymborska is “not
a political poet”; Felicity Rosslyn remarks that
Szymborska “has not shouldered [the] political and
historical burdens [of Milosz], and she has played
no national role”; and Clare Cavanagh notes that
the poet “makes no over pronouncements on the
great themes that have preoccupied other Eastern
European writers.” Szymborska, too, has insisted
that she does not have the nature of an activist, and
that her writing is not political. However, even if
Szymborska’s work makes no overt political statements, it seems a mistake to think of it as completely apolitical. Certainly, Szymborska does not
show in her poetry (save in her early social-realist
verse) allegiances to any one ideology. But this is
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not to say that absent from her work are “subjects
of interest to all the citizens.” In fact, if one looks
at the ideas set forth in “Astonishment”—an apparently apolitical poem—in the context of the
poet’s life and career, it would indicate that the poet
does present ideas that are, in an unusual but profound way, deeply political.
At first glance, “Astonishment” appears to be
a poem solely about the nature of existence in a
metaphysical, not a political, sense. In it, the poet
asks a series of questions about the very nature of
being and humans’ place in the scheme of things.
She is concerned with fundamental issues about her
particular “self,” why she occupies the body she
does, why she exists in the world at this very moment, and why the universe saw fit, after so many
aeons, that she should suddenly come to be. Significantly, she does not ask any questions about human morality or governance, or anything else one
would normally associate with politics. However,
it is equally significant that in the poem, the poet
receives no answers to the questions she poses. The
entire poem is made up of ten questions, but
nowhere does the poet pause to consider how she
might answer the questions she has raised. The
questions follow quickly one upon another, probing more and more deeply into the mysteries of the
universe. But why, it should be asked, does the poet
not even consider how her questions might be responded to? One possibility, suggested by the
poem, seems to be that there are no appropriate responses, at least in rational terms, to these questions. The only fitting response is not intellectual
at all, but emotional; it is the reaction of “astonishment.” To try to articulate answers to the questions about the world in all its mystery would simply not get us very far. They would be vain attempts
to get to the bottom of something that simply is not
within our capacity to answer.
Another possible answer is suggested by
Szymborska in the poem and also reinforced in her
other writings and in her career as a poet. Again,
essentially the answer is that the questions are not
responded to because in some important way there
are no appropriate responses to them. In fact, providing definitive answers to the questions posed
would take us further from, rather than closer to,
the truth. This is because coming up with answers
that are deemed to be the “correct” ones might
make us complacent and not investigate even further to really understand what the nature of reality
is. As Szymborska explains in her 1996 Nobel lecture, poets must live and work with a constant sense
that they “don’t know.” She says that this feeling
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In Central and
Eastern Europe the word
‘poet’ has a somewhat
different meaning from
what it has in the West.
There a poet does not
merely arrange words in
beautiful order. Tradition
demands that he be a
‘bard,’ that his songs linger
on many lips, that he speak
in his poems of subjects of
interest to all the citizens.”
of “not knowing” is essential if one is to retain an
insatiable curiosity about the world. And it is only
this curiosity about the world that allows people to
learn more about it. For if we think we “know,” we
cease to be inspired to ask more questions and investigate further. In her lecture, Szymborska also
explains that there are certain people in the world
who claim that they “know,” and this is an extremely dangerous position to take. She says, “All
sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power with a few loudly
shouted slogans . . . know,” and
whatever they know is enough for them once and for
all. They don’t want to find out about anything else
since that might diminish the force of their arguments. But any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new
questions quickly dies out; it fails to maintain the
temperature required for sustaining life. In the most
extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and
modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.
Thus, it seems that one of Szymborska’s reasons for insisting that there are no answers to life’s
deepest questions is because of the trap humans fall
into when they think they have come upon the
“truth” about something. The Communist Party in
Poland and the Soviet Union, for example, thought
they had the final solution to the question of how
society should function. Very often, dissent from
that established position was met with violence and
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Poems New and Collected: 1957–1997 (1998)
by Wislawa Szymborska is the definitive collection of Szymborska’s poetry in English. It includes translations of 164 of her poems as well
as her Nobel lecture of 1996.
• The Book of Questions by the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda and translated by William O’Daly
(1991) is a collection of 316 brief poems in the
form of unanswerable questions, integrating the
wonder of a child with the experiences of an
adult.
• New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 (2001)
celebrates the exceptional career of the Polish
poet Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1980. Although Milosz’s poetry
is far more political than that of Szymborska, it
is also known for its penetrating insight into fundamental human questions.
• The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy (1997), by Robert Soloman, is an introductory text to philosophy that is comprehensive without being intimidating.
repression. Szymborska was no stranger to the pressures of the Communist government as it insisted
that only certain ideas—the official “truth”—
should be communicated. Her first collection of poetry was not published because it was deemed by
the government to not be political enough nor to
sufficiently echo the ideology of the Communist
state. Szymborska revised her work and published
two collections that reflected the supposedly correct ideological views of her government. She later
retracted the views in those volumes and has since
taken a more liberal position on political issues in
her country. She has been a critic of the Communist state, and under martial law in the early 1980s,
published poems under a pseudonym in Polish underground and exile publications. Szymborska insists that she has not replaced what she “knew” then
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with another form of ideology. Rather, as she says
in her Nobel lecture, she thinks it is crucial that to
avoid the damaging effects of uncritical ideology,
one needs to take a stance in which one continues
to question, probe, think, and ponder, and not to
assume that one “knows.”
“Astonishment” is essentially a philosophical
poem and not a political one, but this is not to say
that there is no political message that can be learned
from it. When one looks at Szymborska’s comments about politics and the damaging effects of
assuming to “know” the truth, it seems that what
the poet might be doing in the poem is showing
that it is the asking of questions rather than the answering of them that is most important. Indeed, by
not offering any answers at all, she seems to be
suggesting that perhaps there are some questions in
this world that simply cannot be answered definitively at all. For when one tries to provide final answers to such questions, one runs the risk of assuming that one “knows” the truth when one does
not. Dictators and demagogues, as she says, routinely assume they “know” the truth and refuse to
listen to different answers to the questions, which
can be a lethal threat to society. When one looks
at the world, the appropriate response is not to think
that one can figure out its deepest mysteries and
come up with a single way to understand what reality is or how humans should live. A more appropriate response to it should perhaps be one of astonishment. Thus the poem has a subtle political
message because it warns against the dangers of assuming one “knows” too much, which the poet has
learned first hand is dangerous for individuals and
society.
Szymborska was not the first person who, by
asking philosophical questions, made a radical political statement. The philosopher Socrates, who
lived in Greece in the fifth century B.C.E., was
known too for upsetting the status quo in his home
of Athens by asking questions of people, many of
them prominent Athenian citizens, who claimed to
“know” the truth in matters of religion, politics,
morality, and metaphysics. Socrates, like Szymborska, claimed that he was ignorant, that he did
not know, but he felt that the people who proposed
to know were no more wise than he, and in fact,
their positions were often dangerous because they
insisted that what was false was actually true.
Socrates was eventually executed because in asking questions he made people recognize that the
“received,” or official, truth of his government was
not necessarily correct. His radicalism was not in
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presenting a competing ideology with the status
quo but simply in asking questions, in showing that
what was accepted as the truth might not be. Szymborska in “Astonishment” may be seen to be doing
the same thing. In the poem, she does not make
grand statements about the political situation of her
country or offer political ideas. She does show that
there are some things about which it is more important to ask questions than to present answers.
And if, in asking those questions, one casts doubt
on ideas that to everyone else seemed so certain,
this is a good thing. For only by continuing to ask
questions can humans make the best of themselves
and avoid the dangers of single-minded political
ideologies.
Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Astonishment,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Wendy Perkins
Perkins teaches American and British literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines the
questions the poem raises on the complex nature
of existence.
In Robert Frost’s poem “Design,” the speaker
describes a scene that occurs regularly in nature. A
moth is attracted to a flower, and after landing on
it, is quickly consumed by a spider that has been
lying there in wait for its next meal. The speaker
offers a contradictory response to this event, considering it to be a natural part of the cycle of life
as it “begins the morning right,” yet at the same
time, finding something sinister in these “assorted
characters of death and blight.”
In the second stanza, the speaker questions
how and why this incident occurred. He asks what
brought the spider and the moth together at the
same specific moment, and what this death scene
suggests about the laws of the universe. At first, he
asks whether a “design of darkness” steered the two
to the flower, suggesting that a malevolent force
shapes our experience. Then, however, he forces us
to recognize that there may be no guiding force in
nature, that design may not “govern in a thing so
small.”
Frost raises these compelling questions on the
nature of the design of the universe, questions that
are at the heart of much of twentieth-century literature, but refuses to provide conclusive answers. In
“Astonishment,” Wislawa Szymborska continues
this existential line of questioning as the speaker in
the poem considers the establishment of identity.
As she presents a series of questions centering on
why we are who we are, Szymborska expresses an
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Ultimately, she
suggests, we can never
know or understand with
any certainty the nature of
our existence.”
epistemological uncertainty about our sense of self.
Ultimately, she suggests, we can never know or understand with any certainty the nature of our existence.
In her acceptance speech for the 1996 Nobel
award for literature, Szymborska insists that all poets constantly struggle with the statement, “I don’t
know.” She explains that all poems delineate an
“effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the
final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was
pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate.” This type
of indeterminacy is at the heart of her poem “Astonishment.”
The poem consists of a series of ten questions,
asked by the speaker, about the nature of existence.
The poem begins its philosophical reflection in the
first line, which asks what determines whether one
will be a human or a bird or a fish or a tree? Szymborska suggests that a certain sense of confinement
results in the acknowledgement that we have been
constructed as a specific self without being allowed
any input into or knowledge of the process. She
asks why we have been “sewn up” in skin rather
than scales, and live in a house rather than a nest,
and “topped off” with a face rather than a leaf.
The next series of questions relate to the specific time and place of one’s existence. The speaker
asks why each of us exists during a specific moment and why we exist on earth instead of on another planet or in another universe. Szymborska reinforces the lack of free will expressed in the early
lines of the poem when she notes that we live on
Earth, “pinned down by the star’s pin.” In line 7,
the speaker tries to determine the self’s relationship
to time, noting the “dates” and “years of my not
being here.” In the next question, Szymborska
speaks for all of us, focusing of the development
of humanity and its differentiation from simpler
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A s t o n i s h m e n t
forms of life, like the coelenterates. How, she asks,
did our cells come together under our celestial bodies to form us into a higher order of species?
In line ten, the speaker turns the line of questioning to a specific one centering on the act of creation. He or she “really” wants to know who or
what situates us in a specific moment of time and
place, “neither an inch nor half a globe too far, neither a minute nor aeons too early.” Line thirteen
tries to get at the essence of the self when the
speaker asks, “what made me fill myself with me
so squarely?”
The last three lines of the poem take a more
somber turn. Szymborska’s suggestions of a lack of
control in the process of creation become a statement
on the imprisonment of the self within a wall of uncertainty. By the end of the poem, the speaker admits to “staring now into the dark and muttering this
unending monologue” to which no one will respond.
The inability to find answers to these compelling
questions on the nature of existence fills the speaker
with frustration and anger, and the monologue becomes “just like the growling thing we call a dog.”
In her Nobel speech, Szymborska expresses
the thesis of the poem as she insists that “whatever
we might think when terrified by its vastness and
our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals” or
“whatever we might think of its expanses pierced
by the rays of stars surrounded by planets” the
world is “astonishing.” Though we have “reserved
tickets” to this incomprehensible “measureless theater” that has a “laughably short” lifespan,
“bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates,” it continually amazes us.
That astonishment, however, conceals what
Szymborska calls “a logical trap.” She notes that
ordinarily we experience this reaction when presented with “things that deviate from some wellknown and universally acknowledged norm, from
an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to.” But
her poem reveals an incomprehensible world that
cannot by compared to something that we can understand. Her questions are unsettling, focusing on
the precarious nature of existence. Thus, frustration
and anger result, and we growl like dogs.
The astonishment in the poem becomes a complex mixture of delight and frustration. Ruth
Franklin, in her article on Szymborska for the New
Republic, notes that in her “meditations on the human condition,” the poet has “a special flair for the
opening line.” In them, Szymborska presents
“straightforward propositions that veer off in an un-
2 6
settling yet gently humorous direction.” The first
line in “Astonishment” announces that the author
will travel on a characteristic route. It begins with
the central question of the poem, what defines the
self, and then travels in several directions in an attempt to come up with an answer. Throughout the
poem, she maintains a playful tone, full of wit and
intellectual rigor. She shows true pleasure in observing and identifying nature’s phenomena, the
dates and fates, and the cells, celestials, and coelenterates, including human beings. We are, she
suggests, special in our individuality; yet when we
cannot find the answers to essential questions that
help us define that individuality, we gain a sense
of being confined to a state of ignorance.
In an article for World Literature Today, Bogdana Carpenter comments that as she crafts her
philosophical probings, Szymborska rarely offers
definitive statements. “Reluctant to provide definitive answers, the poet prefers a margin of uncertainty.” Carpenter suggests that Szymborska’s reluctance does not result from “a lack of moral
determination,” but is instead “an expression of
openness . . . an awareness that truth is complex
and ambiguous, that reality is thick and consists of
a myriad details, all of which need to be taken into
account.” This uncertainty is at the heart of “Astonishment,” as it participates in the twentieth century dialogue on the complex nature of being. Like
Frost’s “Design,” “Astonishment” leaves the readers with the opportunity to articulate their own individual responses to the compelling questions it
raises.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “Astonishment,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Aaron, Jonathan, “‘In the Absence of Witnesses’: The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Fall/Winter 1983 and Spring/Summer 1984, pp.
254–64.
Bojanowska, Edyta M., “Wislawa Szymborska: Naturalist
and Humanist,” in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol.
41, No. 2, 1997, pp. 199–223.
Carpenter, Bogdana, “Wislawa Szymborska and the Importance of the Unimportant,” in World Literature Today, Vol.
71, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 8–12.
Cavanagh, Clare, “Poetry and Ideology: The Example of
Wislawa Szymborska,” in Literary Imagination, Vol. 17,
No. 2, 1999, pp. 174–90.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
A s t o n i s h m e n t
Franklin, Ruth, Review, in New Republic, Vol. 224, No.
4507, June 4, 2001, p. 58.
Milosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind, quoted in Clare Cavanagh, “Poetry and Ideology: The Example of Wislawa
Szymborska,” in Literary Imagination, Vol.17, No. 2, 1999,
pp. 174–90.
Murphy, Dean E., “Creating a Universal Poetry amid Political Chaos: An Interview with Wislawa Szymborska,” in
Los Angeles Times, Sunday, October 13, 1996.
Rosslyn, Felicity, “Miraculously Normal: Wislawa Szymborska,” in PN Review, May/June 1994, pp. 14–18.
Szymborska, Wislawa, “The Poet and the World: Nobel Lecture 1996,” reprinted in Poems New and Collected, by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baraéczak and
Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1998, pp.
xi–xvi.
Further Reading
Cavanagh, Clare, “Poetry and Ideology: The Example of
Wislawa Szymborska,” in Literary Imagination, Vol.17, No.
2, 1999, pp. 174–90.
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Cavanagh discusses how Szymborska, in poetry, explores the world from many points of view and resists ideological pronouncements.
Lukowski, Jerzy, and Herbert Zawadzki, A Concise History
of Poland, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Lukowski and Zawadzki present a short history that
describes how Polish society developed under foreign rule in the nineteenth century and how it was altered by and responded to forty-five years of communism.
Milosz, Czeslaw, The History of Polish Literature, University of California Press, 1984.
Milosz’s book is the standard text of Polish literary
history in English, covering the highlights of Polish
writing from its beginnings to the 1980s.
Rosslyn, Felicity, “Miraculously Normal: Wislawa Szymborska,” in PN Review, May/June 1994, pp. 14–18.
This article considers what issues of importance
Szymborska might be exploring in her elegant, simple verse and finds that the poet can create beautiful
poetry out of the most mundane subjects.
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Blackberrying
Sylvia Plath
1971
According to Plath’s husband, poet Ted Hughes,
“Blackberrying” was written in 1960 after the couple’s return to England and the birth of their daughter. It was not included in Plath’s 1960 collection
Colossus, however, but was first published in 1971,
in the posthumous volume Crossing the Water.
With its long narrative lines, “Blackberrying” takes
the reader on a journey from an external experience to an internal one. Immersed in the details of
her blackberry-picking expedition, the speaker
leads readers to an understanding of certain fears
and foreboding without ever having to spell it out.
Plath uses language and imagery in a very controlled way, leading the reader to see that every
word has a possible double meaning and every image may bring to mind something internal, some
inner working of the speaker. Plath has often been
categorized as being a “confessional” poet who
deals with painful personal experiences in her poetry; however, it is not necessary to view the
speaker of this poem as Plath herself, even though
it uses the first person point of view.
Author Biography
Through her life and her poetry, Sylvia Plath has
influenced the shape of American feminism as well
as contemporary poetry. Critics and historians often describe her as a martyr who died young, a victim of her times as much as her brilliant yet troubled mind and her choice of men.
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In 1960, she published her first collection, The
Colossus and Other Poems, and in the next two
years, bore Hughes two children, Frieda and
Nicholas. After Hughes and Plath separated in
1962, the drive to self-destruction that had intermittently haunted her throughout her life intensified. On February 11, 1963, a month after her autobiographical novel of a nervous breakdown, The
Bell Jar, was published, Plath stuffed the door and
windows of her London apartment with towels,
turned on the gas oven, and put her head inside.
In death, Plath’s reputation grew. Biographies
were published as well as volumes of her letters
and journals. Posthumous collections include Ariel
(1966), which contains many of her most anthologized poems; Crossing the Water (1971), which
contains her poem, “Blackberrying”; and Winter
Trees (1972). In 1982, Plath’s Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Sylvia Plath
Poem Summary
Lines 1–9
Born October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Otto Emil, a German professor and entomologist, and Aurelia Schober, a teacher, Sylvia
Plath led a relatively privileged childhood. Her father, the subject of one of her best known poems,
“Daddy,” died when she was just eight years old.
The next year, Plath published her first poem in the
Boston Traveller. This early achievement was an indicator of future success, as Plath garnered a number of awards for writing in the next two decades.
In 1953, she won first prize from Mademoiselle magazine for her short story, “Sunday at the Mintons.”
Later that year, she made her first attempt at suicide.
In 1955, at Mount Holyoke College, Plath received
the Irene Glascock Poetry Prize, and in 1957, Poetry magazine awarded her the Bess Hopkin Award.
An accomplished poet still not halfway
through her twenties, Plath was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University. It was
here that she met Ted Hughes, a young British man
carving out a reputation for himself as a poet of nature’s violence. Plath married Hughes in 1956, and
took her master’s degree in literature from Cambridge the next year. Their marriage, recounted in
biographies and in Plath’s own letters and journals,
was stormy and rife with jealousy and conflict. After a year teaching in the United States, Plath and
Hughes returned to England to write full-time.
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In this opening stanza, Plath’s speaker introduces readers to the scene and the task at hand—
picking blackberries in a woods near the sea. In the
first line she strongly establishes the isolation of
the setting, emphasizing that “nobody” is in the
lane and repeating the word “nothing.” Through the
use of personification, Plath depicts the berries with
human characteristics, as though “peopling” the
scene with blackberries. They are associated with
the speaker’s thumb, they are likened to eyes, and
they “squander” their juices. By accumulating these
details, Plath prepares the reader for an unusual but
intriguing bond between the blackberries and the
speaker: they have a “blood sisterhood” and the
berries “love” her. In this stanza Plath also introduces the image of a hook, in the curves of the
blackberry “alley” or lane. She also introduces the
image of the sea, although as of yet it remains unseen (it is “somewhere at the end” of the lane). In
the course of the poem Plath will develop these images as the speaker is “hooked,” drawn forward
down the curving path to the mysterious (because
unseen) and somewhat threatening sea.
Lines 10–18
In this stanza Plath expands the setting to include the sky and other living creatures—birds and
flies. Choughs are dark birds, related to crows.
They are presented here as vaguely ominous, sug-
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B l a c k b e r r y i n g
Media
Adaptations
• Harper Audio has released an audiocassette of
Plath reading her own poems: Sylvia Plath
Reads.
• Poet’s Audio Center sells an audiocassette of
Plath reading fifteen poems, entitled Sylvia
Plath (1962). They can be reached at P.O. Box
50145, Washington, DC 20091-0145.
gestive of death. They are described as being “in
black” rather than simply “black,” as though they
are dressed in black clothing, as if in mourning.
They are compared to “bits of burnt paper,” like
ashes blown from a fire; and they caw in “protest”
at some unnamed offense. Their noise seems to
break the stillness of the scene—theirs is the “only
voice.” Significantly, the black coloring of the birds
recalls the blackness of the berries—and anticipates
the blackness of the flies in line 15. In that line the
speaker says of a bush of over-ripe blackberries that
“it is a bush of flies,” suggesting both that the bush
is filled with berries that look like flies and that the
bush is literally covered in flies. Associations with
death occur here too, as the blackberries are depicted as rotting and covered in flies. Plath, then,
has established links between the blackberries, the
choughs, and the flies through their black coloring
and suggestions of death. Looking back, lines 7 and
8, in which the berries “bleed” on the speaker and
establish a “sisterhood” with her, includes the
speaker in this network of associations. The suggestion of death is given a positive aspect, however, with the reference to heaven in line 17. For
the flies, at least, the field of blackberry bushes is
heaven. The “honey-feast” (and, perhaps the “milkbottle” of line 9) is reminiscent of the labelling of
paradise as “the land of milk and honey.” Line 14,
with its description of the “high, green meadows”
that are “glowing as if lit from within,” similarly
evokes a beautiful, golden world. It is also worth
noting that this world is a world of nature, away
from people.
3 0
The sea is again mentioned in this stanza, but
it remains mysterious and distant—so distant that
the speaker doubts it will “appear at all.” But the
path again “hooks” the speaker, drawing her closer
to the sea, away from the blackberries: “One more
hook, and the berries and bushes end” (line 18).
Lines 19–27
This stanza establishes a series of contrasts between the fields of blackberry bushes and the seaside. Emerging from an idyllic world into a harsher
reality, the speaker is buffeted by the wind blowing
off the ocean. The wind “tunnels” at her, and “slaps”
her face. The hills she is leaving behind are “sweet”
(recalling the honey sweetness of the berries) and
what lies ahead is salty (the sea). As if being herded
(the “blackberry alley” has turned into a “sheep
path”), she follows the trail between two hills. She’s
“hooked” again, and now she is standing on the
northern face of the hills she has just left. Plath’s
choice of the word “face” to describe the side of the
hill seems intended to connect it with the face of
the speaker, which has just been slapped by the
wind. The hills’ northern face is orange rock—a
rather startling contrast to the “green meadows” up
on top of the hills. This suggests that the speaker
too is changed, altered by the transition from hilltop to seaside. The rock face (and the speaker’s face)
looks out on “nothing, nothing but a great space.”
This repetition of the phrase “nothing, nothing” reminds the reader of its first occurrence in line 1,
when it referred to the blackberry field. That first
occurrence now seems ironic or paradoxical, because Plath has, through the careful use of detail in
the course of the poem, made what was originally
presented as empty seem very rich and full. This
fullness is now contrasted with the desolate expanse
of the sea. The “din” of the sea also contrasts with
the comparative quiet on the hills, where the cawing of the choughs is “the only voice.” The fact that
the sound of the birds is described as a “voice” is
also significant, for “voice” implies an articulate,
sensible being (what the choughs “say” has meaning), whereas the sound of the sea is violent and
inarticulate, the result of beating on senseless and
unmanageable (“intractable”) metal. It is perhaps
particularly ironic that the inarticulate sea is associated with people—the “silversmiths” whose beating on metal creates a great noise. There are other
subtle allusions in this stanza to the world of humans—the references to “laundry” (human clothing), “sheep” (domesticated animals), and “pewter”
(a man-made metal)—perhaps suggesting that
harshness and violence are associated with humans.
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In contrast, the heavenly world of the blackberry
field has “nobody” (line 1) in it. The poem thus
traces an interior journey within the speaker as well
as the exterior journey down the path. The speaker
travels from a peaceful world of “sisterhood” with
nature, a world that contains suggestions of death,
but which are connected with thoughts of heaven.
She moves to a hard, unsettling world of violence
and noise, a world of people.
Themes
Sublime
Plath’s description of the blackberries and of
the sea evokes a simultaneous sense of awe and reverence best characterized in the idea of the “sublime.” The idea of the sublime was hotly debated
in the eighteenth century and later appeared in the
work of romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, whose writing is marked by speakers aware
of their own smallness in relation to the grandeur
and might of nature. The final image of “Blackberrying” adds terror to the sense of awe, as the speaker
describes
a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Consciousness
In packing her poem with images of life’s abundance and death’s inevitability, Plath points to the
uniqueness and the “problem” of human existence:
human beings are aware that they will die and there
is nothing they can do to change that. Her numerous metaphors and similes for the fruit underscore
her joy at life’s abundance, and her personification
of the berries shows her emotional attachment to the
natural world. This personification occurs in the last
two lines of the first stanza when, after the speaker’s
fingers are covered with juice, she says, “I had not
asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love
me; / They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.” Her sense of death is
embodied in the images of the “the choughs in
black, cacophonous flocks,” and “the hills’ northern face . . . / That looks out on nothing.”
Nature
Nature isn’t always a pretty place where flowers bloom and cute animals frolic in the sun. It is
governed by the cycle of life and death, and the
fact that a part of nature must die for another part
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Describe an incident in your life when you became suddenly aware of your mortality. Did
your behavior change as a result of this awareness? Report your findings to your class.
• Interview your classmates, asking them what
about the natural world most inspires them and
why. Sort the responses into categories and present them to your class, then hold a class discussion about the significance of the findings.
• Is knowing about the personal details of Sylvia
Plath’s life important for understanding this
poem? Why or why not?
• With four class members, compose a visual representation of “Blackberrying.” One stipulation
is that you cannot be literal; that is, you cannot
draw a picture of a woman picking blackberries.
Aim to represent the emotions and ideas in the
poem, rather than the action. When you are finished, present the composition to the class and
have them discuss its meaning.
• Brainstorm a list of symbolic images for life and
for death with your classmates, then compose a
class poem using these images.
• Spend some time looking at a blackberry bramble in your neighborhood, then write a thorough
description of it, using as many metaphors or
similes as you see fit. Compare your description
with other classmates. How is it different, the
same? What do you pay attention to that others
do not?
• Write a short one-act play dramatizing Plath’s
poem and perform it for your class. Feel free to
include dialogue, speech, and action not included in the poem.
to live. “Blackberrying” de-romanticizes nature in
the image of the “bush of berries so ripe it is a bush
of flies, / Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their
wing panes in a Chinese screen. “ This image of
nature cannibalizing itself brings to mind German
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B l a c k b e r r y i n g
philosopher, Freidrich Nietzsche’s words, “All that
is ripe wants to die.”
Journey
The speaker’s journey through the lane of
berries is analogous to the human journey through
life. Sometimes people feel hemmed in on all sides
by life’s pressures, just as Plath’s speaker feels surrounded by berries. The “hooks” in the poem, on
one level part of the literal shape of the alley, can
be read as events that change the direction of one’s
journey through life. Throughout the speaker’s
walk through the alley of berries, she encounters
signs—flies feeding on a bush berries, the “cacophonous flocks” of crows—full of meaning that
only she can understand but not necessarily communicate to others. This is similar to how many
people experience incidents and events in their own
lives, seeing signs in nature that are ominous yet
impossible to decode.
Style
“Blackberrying” has no formal structure. It is a
three-stanza poem, written in free verse. Each
stanza has 9 lines of varying length, some quite
long. These long lines give the poem a greater
prose-like feel than some of Plath’s other poems.
The use of assonance and alliteration, or repetition
of similar sounds, in this poem is subtler than in
other poems by Plath, yet, it is unmistakably present in such passages as “Blackberries / Big as the
ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / Ebon in the
hedges. . . .”
Historical Context
1960s
Plath wrote “Blackberrying” in the autumn of
1961, while living in Devon, England. The year before, she had published her first volume of poetry,
The Colossus, which was generally well received,
but not as favorably as her husband’s, Ted Hughes’s,
second volume of verse, Lupecal, also published in
1960. In poetry, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw
poets such as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke,
John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and others popularize what came to be known as confessional poetry.
Writers of confessional poetry detail intimate facts
about their experience, often addressing previously
3 2
taboo subjects such as sexual practices, drug use, or
the status of their mental health. In 1959, Lowell
published Life Studies, inaugurating the boom in
confessional verse. While living in Massachusetts in
the mid-1950s and teaching at Smith College, Plath
audited a poetry workshop led by Lowell. Sexton
also attended this workshop, and she and Plath became friends. Confessional poetry was, in part, a response to the staid and formal verse of the 1950s. In
her essay, “American Poetry in the 1960s,” poet and
critic Leslie Ullman writes of the confessional poets: “Most of these poets . . . shared a tragic inability to redeem the self, in their personal lives, from
the courageous but overwhelmingly painful process
of self-confrontation they enacted in their poetry.”
Many of these poets took their own lives, including
Plath, Sexton, and Berryman.
1970s
“Blackberrying” wasn’t published until 1971,
when it was included in Crossing the Water. By this
time, the mythology of Plath’s life was firmly in
place. She was brilliant and talented but faced many
hardships due to the influence of two abusive men
in her life, her father and her husband, and she continually struggled to free herself of them. Increased
attention to Plath’s life was partly a result of the increased politicization of feminism. In 1966, the National Organization for Women was formed, pledging “to bring women into the mainstream of
American society.” In 1970, the Labor Department
issued affirmative action guidelines to contractors
doing business with the government. These guidelines covered women and minorities. Women’s demand for control of their reproductive processes resulted in the most liberal abortion law in the country
in 1970 in New York, and just three years later, the
Supreme Court issued its historic Roe v. Wade ruling, making it illegal for states to ban abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Women
made headway in conventionally male-dominated
arenas as well. For example, following a ruling by
the Justice Department of the State of Pennsylvania, they were licensed to box and wrestle in Pennsylvania. In 1971, Gloria Steinem launched the feminist Ms. magazine, whose editors shared tasks in a
communal, cooperative fashion, as opposed to the
more conventional and male-oriented way of delegating tasks through a hierarchy of power. Also,
books such as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) and Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectics
of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970),
increased interest in women’s issues and helped lead
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1960s: Confessional poetry is popularized as poets such as Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Robert
Lowell, and Anne Sexton write freely and
openly about sex, drugs, and their various neuroses.
Today: Confessional poetry is a staple of poetry workshops and literary magazines and journals. Its prose cousin, the literary memoir, is also
extremely popular.
• 1960s: The Women’s Movement gathers steam
as groups such as the National Organization for
Women and the Women’s Equity Action League
are formed to pursue equal opportunity under
the law for women.
Today: The Women’s Movement has continued, shifting slightly to become a human rights
movement in general, and has spread across national boundaries. In 1995, the Fourth World
to the development of women’s studies classes in
universities across the country.
Critical Overview
Much has been written about the relationship of
Plath’s personal life and her work. Although her
poems at first glance seem to be about impersonal
subjects, they often seem to contain a personal connection. Indeed, critics often find it difficult to interpret Plath’s poems without drawing conclusions
based upon her suicide and earlier breakdown. One
of her most ardent supporters, A. Alvarez, however, cautioned against placing too much emphasis
on the autobiographical aspects of Plath’s poetry.
While he praised her exploration of the themes of
death and suicide, he added that he “was not in any
sense meaning to imply that breakdown or suicide
is a validation of what I now call Extremist poetry.
No amount of personal horror will make a good
poet out of a bad one.” In the case of Plath, he
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Conference on Women was held in Beijing,
China, and brought women’s rights groups from
numerous countries together to craft strategy
and share resources.
• 1960s: Approximately 4.5 people per 100,000
commit suicide annually in the United States.
Today: Approximately 6.5 people per 100,000
commit suicide annually in the United States.
• 1960s: After her suicide, Plath’s husband, Ted
Hughes, remains mostly silent about her life and
their relationship.
Today: In 1998, Hughes breaks his silence
about Plath, publishing Birthday Letters, a collection of poems detailing his response to her
writing and death. Hughes dies of cancer months
after its publication.
noted: “The very source of her creative energy was,
it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was,
precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power.”
“Blackberrying” did not appear in print until
long after Plath’s death. In a 1985 retrospective survey of Plath’s poetry, Stanley Plumly wrote enthusiastically, “‘Blackberrying,’ it seems to me,
brings together the best vocal and most effective
visual impulses in Plath’s poetry. It gives the
speaker her role without sacrificing the poem’s purchase on the actual impinging natural world. It enlarges rather than reduces. Its ceremony comes
from one of the poet’s most disguised sources, the
small moment, the domestic life.”
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Semansky is an instructor of English literature
and composition whose essays, poems, and stories
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rot and stick” approach creates a sense of anticipation and of claustrophobia in readers, which they,
in turn, assign to the speaker.
The image of the
feasting flies and martyred
berries, fittingly, closes the
speaker’s own journey
through the lane, which has
also been a symbolic
journey through a
landscape of her own
fears.”
regularly appear in journals and magazines. In this
essay, Semansky considers the idea of persona in
Plath’s poem.
“Blackberrying” has drawn readers’ attention
because they cannot help but imagine the person
behind the poem, the one speaking the words, giving the experience shape. The speaker, however, is
different than the author, in that the speaker herself is a construction, a mask if you will, for the
author’s words. However, for writers such as Plath,
whose personal life has garnered as much, if not
more, attention than her writing, it is often impossible for readers to separate author and persona.
Combining author and persona, however, makes
the poem more meaningful than if it were read in
some cultural vacuum. “Blackberrying” has gained
in popularity among Plath’s poems precisely because it meets readers’ expectations of the kind of
person Plath was represented as being in all of the
public discourse about her: fierce, brilliant, troubled, and haunted by death. Reading the poem, we
see Plath moving among the blackberry bushes, feel
her shifts in consciousness and attention as each
image is pegged.
By delaying the entry of the “I” until the eighth
line of the poem, Plath has readers focus on the
landscape rather than the speaker. She draws us in
by starting off with more general description of her
environment and then narrowing her aim, as if she
is snapping photographs first from a distance and
then from close up. Readers learn that the sea is
“somewhere” at the end of the blackberry lane, but
don’t know when they will arrive at it. This “car-
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When the speaker’s focus shifts to what is literally at hand, she compares the blackberries first
to the ball of her thumb and then to eyes, emphasizing the physicality of her experience. The gap
between the observer and the observed is closing.
The full-fledged identification of the speaker with
the thing she sees occurs after the berries “squander” their “blue-red” juices on her fingers. Squandering something is akin to wasting it, and using
this word to denote the berries’ power to stain suggests the speaker does not feel worthy of the
berries’ juice. Her sense of unworthiness, however,
turns to gratitude in the very next line, when she
says: “I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood;
they must love me.” This newfound communion
with the berries is symbolic of the speaker’s attitude towards nature in general. Critic Jon Rosenblatt, in Sylvia Plath: Poet of Initiation, puts it best,
writing:
The poet seems to identify with the vulnerable, animate form in the midst of a hostile nature. The berries
thus become internalized objects: they symbolize the
fate of human beings who are “eaten” by the universe, a metaphor Plath employs time and again in
the late poetry. The speaker wishes to establish a very
special relation with the berries and with the landscape: it is as if the natural scene had been transformed into a human body and she were commenting on that body’s condition.
The speaker, having identified with the berries,
now adopts a worried tone. She describes a flock
of choughs (Old World crows) in ominous, almost
apocalyptic terms, as, “Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.” Such imagery starkly contrasts
with the lushness of the berries in the first stanza,
and suggests that the speaker, landed, is potentially
at risk, a victim in the making. She never states
what the birds are “protesting” about, but the implication is that they are hungry.
Plath, a student of myth, steeps her poetry in
such symbols. Historically, crows have been a harbinger of death, following Viking armies into battle expecting to feast on the dead. The Celts personified death in the female triplicity known as the
Morrigan, or “the Queen of Shades.” Consisting of
three spirits, the Morrigan was often depicted as a
large, black crow or raven, sweeping down to catch
its prey. Plath’s image carries these associations. It
is after the crows’ emergence that the speaker does
“not think the sea will appear at all.” Her increased
anxiety leads her to read the environment as a land-
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scape fraught with danger and signs of danger. For
the first time, she sees the land outside the lane, describing it in preternatural (supernatural) terms:
“The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit
from within.” This luminosity, however, is a prelude to death, not life, as she next sees “one bush
of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies.” The speaker,
now fully inhabiting the persona of victim, identifies with both berries and flies. The former, having
fruited, are ready to die; the latter, doomed by nature to a short life, are quite possibly enjoying their
last meal. By saying that the flies “believe in
heaven,” the speaker assigns them a human attribute. The image of the feasting flies and martyred
berries, fittingly, closes the speaker’s own journey
through the lane, which has also been a symbolic
journey through a landscape of her own fears.
The last stanza signals a tone of acceptance, as
the speaker finally arrives at the sea, a symbol of
life, chaos, and rebirth. Rather than observing and
identifying with elements of nature, as she has done
in the first two stanzas, the speaker now receives
nature’s force, as “a sudden wind funnels at . . .
[her], / Slapping its phantom laundry in . . . [her]
face.” By comparing the wind hitting her to “phantom laundry,” the speaker introduces a domestic
image, and calls to mind readers’ extra-literary
knowledge of Plath’s private life, which was riven
by marital discord. This knowledge cannot but feed
into their understanding of the speaker’s persona.
She is now pushed along the sheep path, prodded
by unseen forces both inside and outside her, until
she arrives at the “hills’ northern face” that “looks
out on nothing.” This “nothing” suggests both death
and the absence of meaning. Her literal journey
through the blackberry lane, a figurative journey
into herself and her place in nature, has come to an
end. The last things she sees and hears are:
a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Rosenblatt notes that, “Unlike the blackberries,
which Plath converted into ‘sisters,’ the sea resists
all comforting anthropomorphic interpretation.”
However, the sound is a human one, and made by
those who labor. Regardless that the metal is “intractable,” the sound is one that suggests the possibility, if not the probability, of change, even if
that change comes at death. At the poem’s end,
readers are left with the image of a speaker who
creates nature in her own image but who cannot
sustain that image throughout her entire journey.
When she loses her ability to see herself in nature,
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander, collects essays about Sylvia Plath’s writing,
her life, and her reputation. This is a useful resource for those just beginning research on
Plath.
• Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, published a month
before her suicide in 1963 and considered by
many to be a fictionalized autobiography, tells
the story of a woman’s battle against depression
and her emotional breakdown.
• Plath’s posthumous collection of poems entitled
Crossing the Water contains her poem “Blackberrying.”
• Margaret Dickie Uroff’s 1979 book entitled
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is the first fulllength assessment of the relationship between
Plath and Hughes.
she turns toward the human world. If readers see
the speaker in the image of the silversmith, they
see someone who continues to figuratively “bang
her head” against nature, willing it to change.
“Blackberrying” wasn’t published until 1971,
when it appeared in her collection, Crossing the
Water. This is a full eight years after Plath committed suicide and the stories of her life and tragic
death had worked their way into public consciousness. It is these stories that readers bring with them
to her poem, and which help to fashion their image of the speaker behind it.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Blackberrying,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Carl Mowery
Mowery holds a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois
University and has written extensively for The Gale
Group. In this essay, Mowery examines color and
sea imagery in Plath’s poem.
The most important aspect of a poet’s creative
effort is the manipulation of language to create
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In ‘Blackberrying,’
Plath adopts a sparseness
of expression that focuses
the reader’s attention
sharply on the imagery she
presents.”
unique images. It is through the clever use of the
words that the writer invites the reader to experience routine images in new ways. For Sylvia Plath,
the value of imagery “is not its novelty but its accuracy,” notes Alicia Ostriker. An image is anything in a poem that calls on the reader to respond
using the senses. Images are the sensory content of
a work and they may be literal or figurative. The
words “red rose” call on the reader to “see” a rose;
the rough texture of sandpaper asks the reader to
“feel” the gritty surface of the paper; the aroma of
a pot of baked beans evokes the “smell” of the
beans. This, in the hands of good poets, is what
makes poetry engaging.
Two prominent aspects of Plath’s poetry are sea
imagery and the colors used to intensify the imagery.
Edward Lucie-Smith (writing in 1970) notes that her
“obsession with the sea” runs throughout her major
volumes of poetry, including The Colossus (1960),
Ariel (1965), and The Uncollected Poems (1965).
She “returns to it obsessively, again and again” and
this becomes one of the most important images in
all of her poetry, including the posthumous volume
Crossing the Water (1971). Many critics report that
the image of the sea is symbolic of a variety of objects or events, i.e., death (drowning) or a lifegiving and maternal medium. In Plath’s poetry,
“contrary to tradition, it is thought of as male,” says
Lucie-Smith. Here, the focus will be the literal imagery, not what the image represents.
E. D. Blodgett wrote that one purpose “of
Plath’s poetry is to use imagery . . . to make a savage appeal to the reader.” Many of her poems that
are filled with this kind of appeal include verbal
and visual savagery. The poem “Full Fathom Five”
(written in 1958) is an early example of Plath’s use
of threatening sea imagery. This poem, with the
same title as a poem by Shakespeare from The Tempest, begins:
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Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide’s coming
When seas wash cold, foamCapped.
From these seemingly benign opening lines the
sea is then transformed into:
keeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
of, not fathomed.
In this poem, the poet takes the reader on a
journey that leads away from a threatening sea. The
reader is encouraged to avoid it rather than understand it.
Contrary imagery is found in other poems of
Plath’s that employ the sea as the chief image. In
“Finisterre” (from September 1961), the opening
image is “the sea exploding / With no bottom.” But
at the end of the poem, the image is transformed
through the eyes of “Our Lady of the Shipwrecked”
in this line: “She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.” From an exploding image to
the object of the Lady’s love, Plath juxtaposes the
threatening and beckoning nature of the sea. A brief
reference to a comforting sea is found in “Morning Song” (February 1961) when a mother, listening for her child’s cry, says “A far sea moves in
my ear.” In the motherly context of the poem, this
is a positive sea image. These conflicts are part of
the intrigue of the sea imagery in Plath’s poetry.
The poem “Man in Black” (from 1959) begins
with the “shove and suck of the gray sea,” showing the sea as a hostile, threatening force. Later,
“the wave unfists” against the headland in its relentless attack on the shore. Similarly in “Point
Shirley” (1959) she writes:
The gritted wave leaps
The seawall and drops into a bier
Of quahog chips,
leaving a salty mash of ice.
In this poem, the sea not only attacks the seawall, it crosses it and attacks an area behind it.
“Suicide off Egg Rock” (1959) contains even
more disturbing imagery with:
—that landscape
of imperfections his bowels were part of—
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
In these lines, the corpse of a suicide victim
has washed up onto the shore. The final line of the
poem closes with “The forgetful surf creaming on
those ledges.” These are examples of Plath’s imagery of the sea as a relentless force, one that is
unaware of the damage it does to the shore and the
breakwaters that have been built to hold it back. It
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is an impersonal force with a disregard for the people it encounters; even the suicide’s body is
“Abeached with the sea’s garbage.” In these three
poems, the brutal nature of the images shows the
sea as male.
“Blackberrying,” written in September 1961,
is what Douglas Dunn calls “a poem of menacing
description” that uses “direct statements”—“Blackberries as big as the ball of my thumb”—to create
“surprising” imagery in the poem. A striking combination of the critiques by Dunn and Blodgett
comes at the end of “Blackberrying.” After following the sheep path, the speaker and the reader
are assaulted by the overpowering image of the vast
and mysterious sea. This final impression from the
poem combines the calls of the choughs (an Old
World, crow-like black bird with a harsh, electronic-sounding call), the rush of the wind and the
din of the sea itself into what Plath calls a “doom
noise” in “Finisterre.”
Plath draws the reader into the text through
what Dunn has called her “improved sense of
drama,” especially in her volume Crossing the Water (1971). This is created by her use of the “direct
statements” and a “freedom of movement” that
avoids “the earlier clotted style” of poems from previous volumes. Compare the introduction of the
hills in the following lines from “The Great Carbuncle” (1957) to a similar introduction in the last
stanza of “Blackberrying”:
We came over the moor-top
Through air streaming and green-lit,
Stone farms foundering in it,
Valleys of grass altering
In a light neither of dawn
Nor nightfall.
Note the more simply described hills in the last
stanza of “Blackberrying” and the somewhat congested presentation in the earlier poem. (This comparison does not mean to imply that one poem is
better than the other; it merely indicates the difference in style that Dunn points out.) In “Blackberrying,” Plath adopts a sparseness of expression that
focuses the reader’s attention sharply on the imagery she presents. In this way, she adopts the
motto of the Bauhaus architects that says “Less is
More.” (In architecture this was a movement away
from a florid style to a more austere style.) This
analysis applies especially to Plath’s poetry from
her later volumes.
Dunn also comments that the poems in Crossing the Water, including “Blackberrying,” are filled
with “unexpected imagery” of the kind now under
discussion. A writer for the London Times has com-
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mented that the poems in this volume are compelling because they “map out a territory which is
unique, harrowing, . . . and which breeds its own
distinctive landscapes.” The writer remarks that
these poems create a world filled with “the shock
of surprise” at the mutable nature of the images in
them. In the present context, this means that the sea
is both changeable (always in motion) and permanent (always present). Plath plays with these contradictions to increase the dramatic tension in
“Blackberrying.”
In “Blackberrying,” the dramatic moment of
meeting the sea is intensified by the hesitant way
it has been introduced (by the poet) into the poem.
At first it is at the end of the path, “heaving.” Then
the speaker, impatient at the length of time it takes
to follow the path, says, “I do not think the sea will
appear at all.” Finally, the sea is confronted but it
is “nothing but a great space.” It is this combination of hesitation and anticipation that creates the
reader’s interest. But when the sea is met, it is not
what is expected at the end of a walk spent picking blackberries. It is an empty hostile sea that Jon
Rosenblatt calls a “powerful and gigantic nothingness.” The hope of a comforting encounter is
dashed just as the sea itself dashes repeatedly
against the shore in the deafening din. The speaker
and the reader are left on the shore facing the unrestrained savagery of this hostile sea.
Brita Lindberg-Seyersted claims that the
speakers in many of Plath’s poems are uneasy in
the out-of-doors, exhibiting “feelings of estrangement and fear.” In “Blackberrying,” the impatient
speaker seems to be in a hurry to get to the end of
the journey without taking the time to enjoy the experience of the blackberry patch. Stanza three
opens with “The only thing to come now is the sea.”
However, this seems a bit of wishful thinking because two hills and one more turn in the path remain in the walk to the sea.
Margaret Newlin says that it is “tempting to
call Sylvia Plath a landscape poet.” This comes
from the fact that she often writes about outdoor
locations near her home. Lindberg-Seyersted reports that when she lived in the United States, inspiration came from the New England coast. When
she lived in England, scenes were often taken from
Devon and London.
Plath’s deliberate approach to poetry, especially the land and seascapes, gives her poetry
crispness and clarity. Lindberg-Seyersted explains
that “Plath’s depictions of places and landscapes
reveal her interest in pictorial art.” It is readily seen
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in her use of color and color combinations that contribute to the development of crisply drawn outdoor
scenes. Many of her best poems are “landscape
word-paintings,” according to Phoebe Pettingill.
An example of this “word-painting” is found in
these lines from “Blackberrying”:
A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange
rock
That looks out on nothing.
This passage could have been inspired by a
painting hanging in a museum. The Seascape at
Saintes-Maries by Vincent van Gogh and The
Stormy Sea by Gustav Corbet are both excellent examples of paintings that embody the same intense
quality described in these poems by Plath.
Some of her poems take their names from
paintings. For example, “Snakecharmer” (written
in 1957) and “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among
Lilies” (from 1958) are both inspired by paintings
by Henri Rousseau. At the end of the latter, Plath
writes:
Rousseau confessed . . . that he put you on the
couch
To feed his eye with red: such red! under the
moon,
In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!
The colors in these excerpts function as intensifiers of the scene. The rock and the couch could
exist in the poems without the stated color, but including unexpected or intense color descriptions
adds to the drama of the passage. In “Blackberrying,” the rock face is “orange,” an unexpected
color. In “Yadwigha,” the couch is “such red” and
it stands in direct contrast to the “great lilies” and
“all that green.” Just as a crafty painter would use
unconventional colors or color contrasts, so too
does Plath. Her use of green twice in “Blackberrying” pushes the reader to see this color in two different ways. The first is a green that is “lit from
within” and the second describes the hills as “too
green and sweet.” Moreover, Plath’s attention to
the pictorial details of her poetry yields, what
Newlin has called, a “salt-aired painterly scene.” In
“Blackberrying,” facing the funneling wind at the
moment the sea is first seen is a particularly
poignant “salt-aired” image.
The “savage appeal” that Blodgett notes builds
continuously toward the closing line: “Of white and
pewter lights, a din like silversmiths / Beating and
beating at an intractable metal.” Here the poet captures one final powerful image—a noisy, determined, overpowering, yet mysterious sea. To do
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this, she combines two descriptive sensory attributes, color and sound, into one concluding image.
The progression of color from pure unaltered white,
through the unrefined gray pewter to shiny silver
is paralleled in the sounds of the poem, a movement from the raucous cawing of the choughs
through the rushing wind to the din of the roaring
sea. As these are combined, they drag the speaker
and the reader through ever-intensifying levels of
sight and sound.
Margaret Uroff has commented that as a result
of Plath’s attempts to write about landscapes realistically, she created “deceptive and encroaching”
landscapes. The images in the poems herein discussed make Blodgett’s “savage appeal” to the
reader an unrelenting challenge to the senses and
imagination. While the images themselves may not
be literally savage, they grasp the reader on a primordial level.
This essay has focused on Plath’s crafty use of
color as an intensifying agent in image building and
on literal sea images that are at once beckoning
and threatening. In “Blackberrying,” the pewtercolored sea is the most powerful and enduring
image.
Source: Carl Mowery, Critical Essay on “Blackberrying,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Alvarez, A., “Sylvia Plath” in Triquarterly, No. 7 Fall 1966,
pp. 65–74.
Bertens, Hans, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, Routledge, 1995.
Blodgett, E. D., “Sylvia Plath: Another View,” in Modern
Poetry Studies, Vol. II, No. 3, 1971, pp. 97–106.
Dunn, Douglas, “Damaged Instruments,” in Encounter, August 1971, pp. 68–80.
Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita, “Sylvia Plath’s Psychic Landscapes,” in English Studies, Vol. 71, No. 6, December 1990,
pp. 509–22.
Lucie-Smith, Edward, “Sea-Imagery in the Work of Sylvia
Plath,” in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, edited by
Charles Newman, Indiana University Press, 1970, pp.
91–99.
Newlin, Margaret, “The Suicide Bandwagon,” in Critical
Quarterly, Winter 1972, pp. 367–78.
Ostriker, Alicia, “Fact as Style: The Americanization of
Sylvia,” in Language and Style, Vol. I, No. 1, Winter 1968,
pp. 201–12.
Pettingill, Phoebe, “The Voices of Sylvia Plath,” in New
Leader, Vol. LXV, No. 10, May 17, 1982, pp. 10–11.
P o e t r y
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S t u d e n t s
B l a c k b e r r y i n g
Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes,
Harper and Row, 1981.
—, Crossing the Water, Harper & Row, 1971.
Rosenblatt, Jon, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, University of North Carolina Press, 1979, pp. 89–92.
Ullman, Leslie, “American Poetry in the 1960s,” in A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Jack
Meyers and David Wojahn, Southern Illinois University
Press, 1991, pp. 190–97.
Uroff, Margaret Dickie, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, University of Illinois Press, 1979, pp. 109–10.
“A World in Disintegration,” in Times Literary Supplement,
No. 3643, December 24, 1972, p. 1602.
Further Reading
Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia
Plath, University of Missouri Press, 1980.
Broe attempts to demythologize Plath in this study
of the themes and techniques in her poetry.
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Davison, Peter, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from
Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, W. W. Norton & Company,
1996.
Davison recounts the Boston poetry world of the mid1950s in this memoir, describing the complex relationships among poets such as Robert Lowell,
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, and
W. S. Merwin.
Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted
Hughes, Knopf, 1994.
Malcolm’s controversial “biography” addresses how
Plath’s reputation developed after she had died. Malcolm examines the complex and complicated relationship Plath’s ex-husband, Ted Hughes, had with
Plath’s estate, and the steps he took to protect his
own privacy.
Rosenblatt, Jon, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
Arguing that criticism on Plath has been “tendentious
and extra literary,” Rosenblatt reads Plath’s poems
as enacting a private ritual process of death and rebirth.
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Dream Variations
Langston Hughes
1924
“Dream Variations” combines two distinct motifs
that were evident in Langston Hughes’s poetry
throughout his lifetime. It is written in a structure
that copies the repetitions of American blues music,
and it is aimed, as many of his works were, primarily at children. Published first in 1932, in the collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems,
“Dream Variations” imitates the overall structure of
blues music: the first, second, and fourth lines of
each stanza parallel each other in that they each have
four syllables, while the third is extended, longer,
building to an emotional climax. Hughes was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic
movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which brought
the New York African-American arts community
into prominence. He used the blues structure because
it was familiar to blacks who found no point of reference in standard literary modes. Using a blues style
also helped Hughes swiftly and efficiently convey
the mixed emotions of hope and fear that the poem
brings together. Analyzing blues music in a book
previous to The Dream Keeper, he observed, “The
mood of the Blues is almost always despondency,
but when they are sung, people laugh.” This poem
takes whatever the mental process is that makes people react to bleakness with laughter, and nudges it
upward toward positive action.
Hughes was a writer committed to his people,
American Negroes, who suffered under segregation
and discriminatory laws. His concern for justice
drove him to write in a number of literary genres,
including poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and
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essays. His poems for children stress the potential
in life, encourage them to look for the good things
that life has to offer, and to actively seek happiness. He was one of the few poets to state such simple ideas in the elementary language that his intended audience would understand, raising
undereducated readers up to noble thoughts instead
of talking down to them.
Author Biography
Hughes was born James Langston Hughes in 1902
in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel and Carrie
Mercer Langston Hughes, who separated shortly
after their son’s birth. Hughes’s mother had attended college, while his father, who wanted to become a lawyer, took correspondence courses in
law. Denied a chance to take the Oklahoma bar
exam, Hughes’ father went first to Missouri and
then, still unable to become a lawyer, left his wife
and son to move first to Cuba and then to Mexico.
In Mexico, he became a wealthy landowner and
lawyer. Because of financial difficulties, Hughes’s
mother moved frequently in search of steady work,
often leaving him with her parents. His grandmother Mary Leary Langston was the first black
woman to attend Oberlin College. She inspired the
boy to read books and value an education. When
his grandmother died in 1910, Hughes lived with
family friends and various relatives in Kansas. In
1915 he joined his mother and new stepfather in
Lincoln, Illinois, where he attended grammar
school. The following year, the family moved to
Cleveland, Ohio. There he attended Central High
School, excelling in both academics and sports.
Hughes also wrote poetry and short fiction for the
Belfry Owl, the high school literary magazine, and
edited the school yearbook. In 1920 Hughes left to
visit his father in Mexico, staying in that country
for a year. Returning home in 1921, he attended
Columbia University for a year before dropping
out. For a time he worked as a cabin boy on a merchant ship, visited Africa, and wrote poems for a
number of American magazines. In 1923 and 1924
Hughes lived in Paris. He returned to the United
States in 1925 and resettled with his mother and
half-brother in Washington, D.C. He continued
writing poetry while working menial jobs. In May
and August of 1925 Hughes’s verse earned him literary prizes from both Opportunity and Crisis magazines. In December of that year Hughes, then a
busboy at a Washington, D.C. hotel, attracted the
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Langston Hughes
attention of poet Vachel Lindsay by placing three
of his poems on Lindsay’s dinner table. Later that
evening Lindsay read Hughes’s poems to an audience and announced his discovery of a “Negro busboy poet.” The next day reporters and photographers eagerly greeted Hughes at work to hear more
of his compositions. He published his first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Around
this time Hughes became active in the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of creativity among a group
of African-American artists and writers. Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers founded
Fire!, a literary journal devoted to AfricanAmerican culture. The venture was unsuccessful,
however, and ironically a fire eventually destroyed
the editorial offices. In 1932 Hughes traveled with
other black writers to the Soviet Union on an illfated film project. His infatuation with Soviet Communism and Joseph Stalin led Hughes to write on
politics throughout the 1930s. He also became involved in drama, founding several theaters. In 1938
he founded the Suitcase Theater in Harlem, in 1939
the Negro Art Theater in Los Angeles, and in 1941
the Skyloft Players in Chicago. In 1943 Hughes received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Lincoln
University, and in 1946 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He continued to
write poetry throughout the rest of his life, and by
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the 1960s he was known as the “Dean of Negro
Writers.” Hughes died of congestive heart failure
in New York City, New York, on May 22, 1967.
blues lyrics describe hardship and suffering, which
this poem does also. The poem, though, twice mentions holding fast to dreams, emphasizing that
hardship and suffering are not inevitable. Line 6
changes the word “die” to “go”: not only does this
start a new rhyme, but it also adds to the sense of
how vulnerable dreams are, and how easy it is to
lose them.
Lines 7–8
Since blues music is traditionally from the
southern part of the United States, which is warm
and was mostly farm land at the time Hughes was
writing, the idea of the “barren field” is an expected
metaphor. The description “frozen with snow,”
however, is pointedly strange and hostile. There is
a common association between barrenness, sterility (in the sense of sustaining no life), and being
frozen. The picture Hughes gives of life in these
lines is bleak, but even worse than doomed: he says
that life can be hopeless if you allow it to be.
Line 9
Poem Summary
Lines 1–2
In line 1, Hughes uses the word “fast,” not only
because it means the same thing in this context as
“close” or “tight” would, but also because the
reader cannot help but think of hurrying, and this
adds a sense of urgency to the poem at its very start.
The question of how to hold a dream, which is not
as obvious as it might first seem to the casual
reader, is central to this piece. Throughout the
poem, Hughes’s language treats dreams as if they
were physical objects.
Lines 3–4
In line 3 the poem metaphorically identifies
life with a bird. Hughes is very specific about why
this bird could not fly. In using “broken-winged”
instead of “crippled,” he implies that some violence
has occurred to the bird, and therefore to the dreamless life. Birds are commonly associated with
dreams and ideals in literature because their flight
in the empty sky matches the idea of uninhibited
freedom, like the mind’s freedom.
Lines 5–6
The first two lines are nearly repeated in lines
5–6, resembling the repetition in blues music,
which this poem is based upon. Traditionally,
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This line states explicitly that these images and
actions constitute the speaker’s dream. The exclamation mark demonstrates the speaker’s certainty
and elation about his dream.
Lines 10–11
These lines introduce the second stanza’s repetition and variation of the first stanza. Line 11 is
a metaphor that personifies the sun, giving it a human “face.” Line 11 also rhymes “face” with the
“place” in line 2, but changes the line’s meaning.
Now that the first stanza has established the
speaker’s association of the sun with whiteness, “in
the face of the sun” takes on two meanings. Not
only would the speaker like to fling his arms freely
in daylight, but he wishes that gesture to signal joyous defiance to that face. What he defies is ambiguous; perhaps he defies all that the sun represents in this poem—whiteness, labor, exhaustion,
or the passage of time that the sun’s cycles mark.
Lines 12 and 13 also support this notion of defying time.
Line 12
Again, this line repeats the words “whirl,
dance, day” and “done” of lines 3 and 4, yet means
something different. Whereas line 3 suggests how
the speaker might dance to celebrate a sense of freedom, in line 12 the celebration seems frantic, ominous, and obligatory: “Dance!” is a command. The
tone of the speaker’s dance may have changed be-
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cause the speaker has come to recognize that each
passing day marks one less day to live.
Line 13
Line 13 changes the “white day” of line 4 to
“quick day.” The day’s “quick” passage may explain the speaker’s feeling of urgency, as if there
is precious little time left in which to live. He may
feel that daylight time is stolen from him by the
sun as it withdraws each day. Since the effects of
whiteness or white culture on this speaker are probably not “quick” (unfortunately), here the sun may
shift from its previous symbolic associations with
whiteness to a more conventional and literal association with time’s passage.
Lines 14–15
Like line 13’s transformation of the “white
day” to a “quick day,” line 14 transforms the “cool
evening” into “pale evening.” On a literal level,
these variations describe day and evening in ordinary terms. But on a figurative level, “day” loses
some of its associations with whiteness while
“evening,” by becoming “pale,” acquires more
whiteness. The ellipses (three dots indicating an unfinished thought) at the ends of lines 14 and 15
make the lines’ meanings more ambiguous. Once
the evening takes on an ambiguous complexion, is
it “dark” like the speaker or white like the day? The
speaker’s relation to the tree is similarly uncertain.
He no longer rests “beneath” it. The tree simply
floats beside the image of evening. Which one
“rests”: the evening or the tall slim tree? If the tree
is resting (and “slim” usually refers to people), the
speaker may be imagining himself as the tree. As
a tree, he would achieve his dream of flinging his
arms, or branches, wide in the sun, and he would
have found a peaceful, safe, and more permanent
home on Earth. Simply by using the vague punctuation of ellipses, Hughes uproots the reader’s sense
of where the speaker is at and what is being compared. Although the reader can assume that the
speaker does not actually become a tree, the
speaker’s vision of transformation suggests that he
achieves a momentary feeling of peace and eternity, if only in his imagination.
Media
Adaptations
• Voices and Visions: Langston Hughes, The
Dream Keeper (1999) is a video biography that
illustrates the importance of Langston Hughes
as a poet and as the voice of African Americans
and a champion of black artists.
• In Langston Hughes Reads His Poetry (1995),
Hughes reads from his works and shares his experiences growing up black in the early- to midtwentieth century in an openly segregated and
prejudiced society.
• The Academy of American Poets maintains a
Hughes web page at http://www.poets.org (last
accessed January, 2002) with links to other interesting sites.
Line 17
Here the speaker compares nature to himself
(“like me”). Night closes the poem, forming the last
image of passing time. Through this comparison
and this concluding image, Hughes conveys a pride
in Blackness. Hughes’s poems consistently create
images and arguments for black pride. In 1924,
when this poem was written, the concept of black
pride was radical and rarely expressed in print.
Contemporary readers must consider the era and
culture in which this or any poem was written in
order to understand more fully the poem’s impact
on literary and American history.
Themes
The Spiritual Reunion with Africa
Line 16
As either a tree or a man, night still seems to
the speaker to be tender and familiarly black. The
change from “dark like me” (line 8) to “black like
me” in the final line suggests a shift like that of
evening to night: from an in-between stage to a complete stage, where darkness predominates over light.
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Although nowhere in “Dream Variations” does
the speaker say where his dream takes place, it has
been suggested by many critics that the “place of
the sun” to which he refers is Africa. Langston
Hughes wrote the poem in 1924, a time when the
Back to Africa movement was gaining strength,
when African art was being introduced to Europe
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Research the different ways that dreams are used
and understood in different cultures. For example, find out how dreaming is viewed in the Australian aboriginal tradition, in ancient African
myths and legends, and in modern Western theories of psychoanalysis. What do these various
approaches to understanding dreams have in
common?
• Try to find examples in Western literature where
“blackness” has been used to stand for negative,
sinister, or depraved and evil qualities and where
“whiteness” has been looked upon as implying
purity, innocence, and goodness.
• Examine how the “American dream” has been
depicted in American literature. Is there a difference between how the idea has been expressed by white writers and black writers?
• Explore how the black nationalism movement
has evolved since the 1920s.
the speaker enjoys a sense of spiritual as well as
physical liberation. The references to “dark” and
“black” in positive terms also seem to indicate that
this is a place where blackness is celebrated, not
condemned. For many African Americans, Africa
was viewed as a spiritual homeland, the place of
their ancestry where they could finally be themselves. In “Dream Variations,” this idea of Africa
as a place of freedom, unspoiled charm, and celebration is suggested by the speaker’s feeling of contentment from morning till night.
While Hughes’s early poems show a degree of
interest in Africa as the spiritual homeland of
American blacks, he wrote in his autobiography,
The Big Sea, that he rejected this idea in the 1930s.
The poems that refer to Africa were written in response to a mood of the 1920s rather than from his
own personal convictions. Hughes says that he
did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging
through me, and so I could not live and write as
though I did. I was only an American Negro—who
loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of
Africa—but I was not African.
Still, in “Dream Variations” and other poems
that celebrate the ideal of an African homeland,
Hughes captured an important sentiment expressed
by American blacks who were searching for a spiritual home where they would be accepted and
treated as equals and not judged by the color of
their skin.
The Dream Motif
and America, and when many African Americans
were searching for a place and values that were distinctly their own and not part of white American
culture. Hughes had traveled to West Africa in
1923, and in many of his early poems, he uses
Africa to represent an ideal, a place of warmth and
freedom that is a foil to the cold, uncaring atmosphere of the United States where for blacks discrimination, racism, and often brutal treatment
were a feature of everyday life.
In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker describes his dream. He is in a sunny place, his arms
flung wide as he whirls and dances until the end of
the day. At evening, he rests beneath a tall tree. The
images of the sun, dancing, and a tall tree seem to
suggest an exotic, tropical paradise free of worry
and where the spirit can be liberated. The second
stanza presents the same images in more intense
form. In both stanzas, there is a sense that the place
of the dream is beautiful and primitive. If the place
is Africa, it is a land of joy and freedom, and there
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The dream motif is one that pervades much of
Hughes’s writing, and the idea of the dream is used
in several ways in “Dream Variations.” In one of his
most famous poems, “Harlem” (1951), the author
asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” The
dream of political freedom and economic well being for African Americans, he suggests, is one aspect of the “American dream,” but it cannot be fulfilled because of the racism that pervades American
society. In Hughes’s social poetry he depicts black
life and shows how African Americans’ attempts to
fulfill their dreams have been thwarted. The other
type of dream that Hughes often refers to in his poems is the romantic dream-fantasy, where the
speaker dreams of ideal love, adventure, or spiritual
release. This latter type of dream is more personal
than social, as the poet yearns for a state of being or
mind that may not be achievable through political
means but through some mental awakening or in
one’s fantasy. In “Dream Variations,” the speaker
seems to merge these two ideas of the dream. The
speaker describes a dream that he is having where
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he is in a faraway place and things are good. It is an
intensely personal, romantic dream. There are no
overt references to political or social events or situations, as the speaker tells of his own dream where
his soul is set free. The speaker’s dream, it has been
suggested, might be of Africa, a place where he can
finally feel joyful and at home. However, it should
be asked why the speaker is dreaming of the kind of
liberation he describes. Most likely this is because
his life as it is is not free. In the dream, the speaker
can dance and whirl with abandon, which seems to
indicate that in reality this is simply not a possibility. That is, because of the racism that is such a part
of American society, he cannot be a part of the
“American dream” and must hope instead for a freedom of a different kind and in a different place. Thus
in his intensely personal dream-fantasy, the speaker
longs for spiritual freedom because for him, as an
African American, his dream of freedom is by necessity “deferred” because of the effects of racism.
It has also been suggested by one critic that because the poem has nine lines in the first stanza and
only eight in the second stanza, this implies the
dwindling of the dream. The speaker, it is claimed,
longs for his dream and sees the externalization of
it in his love for nature, the place, and the sun. But
the dream exists only in the lyric moment of timelessness, and in the dynamic world of social change
(seen in the second stanza), the dream decays. Another interpretation of the poem takes a quite different approach. It claims that in the first stanza, the
speaker describes the dream in mental, rational, conscious terms and in the second he is actually in a
dream state, experiencing the dream. The first
stanza is descriptive, uses infinitives (“To dance,”
“to whirl”), and is syntactically organized. The second stanza, on the other hand, is fragmented, elliptical, and intensified, as are dreams. The poem, according to the second interpretation, can thus be
seen as an exploration of different types of mental
experiences, showing a movement from a rational,
ego-dominated state to an irrational, innocent
dreamlike state. These two states are described in
the poem to show that black Africans are encumbered with two identities, a “double-consciousness,”
as well as to show that this dualism can be unified.
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references to “white” and “pale” are not at all
derogatory, implying that feelings of prejudice because of color are unnatural and unfounded. In the
speaker’s dream, white, paleness, darkness, and
night are all part of the beautiful landscape. But the
speaker himself identifies with night and darkness.
In the place of his dream, night comes gently and
tenderly; it is not to be feared but welcomed. The
speaker praises night, the time of dreams, and with
it, he also celebrates himself and his race.
Style
By conventional poetic standards, the structure of
“Dream Variations” is simple: there are two
rhyming lines (die/fly, go/snow); the first, second
and fourth line of each stanza each have four syllables; there is no consistent rhythmic structure (no
meter); and 26 of the 32 words are just one syllable. But, this poem does not intend to follow any
poetic structure: Hughes has given it the structure
of the blues, a musical form from the American
South with its rhythmic roots in Africa. Blues songs
deal with loss and defeat in such a way that hardship can be contained, even conquered, in the minds
of the people who have suffered. It is the strict structure of the blues that helps the mind take control of
the misery stated in the words. In standard blues,
there is one long line, with a pause in the middle,
repeated and then followed by a long unbroken third
line, followed by a fourth line that resolves the problem, sometimes happily but usually stoically, accepting a bad situation. In each stanza of “Dreams,”
Hughes uses the long first line with the pause in the
middle (represented by the line break after “dreams”
in lines 1 and 5), but he does not repeat this line.
There is a climax in the third line of each stanza
that draws attention to itself by giving the reader the
poem’s vivid imagery (“broken-winged bird” and
“barren field”); and a final line that could, by itself,
leave the reader with a bleak view of the world if
the poem did not twice offer the solution to that
bleakness: “Hold fast to dreams.”
The Celebration of Blackness
“Dream Variations” is a subtle celebration of
blackness as it presents darkness and night in positive terms. Again, the ideas in the poem are not
stated overtly but merely suggested. The speaker is
in a dreamy place of love and relaxation and he is
identified with the “gentle” and “tender” night. The
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Historical Context
Black Nationalism and the
Back-to-Africa Movement in the 1920s
The end of World War I in 1918 proved to be
a mixed blessing for black Americans. When the
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1920s: Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and controversial leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, gains popularity with
his call for education, solidarity, and black pride
to help lift African Americans out of the cycle
of poverty and despair that is a result of racism.
Today: Minister Louis Farrakhan, the charismatic and controversial leader of the Nation of
Islam, preaches a message of black pride and solidarity to help African Americans forge their own
identity separate from white American culture.
lowing the police shooting of a young black
man.
• 1920s: African Americans work at the lowest
paying jobs available, usually as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, and domestics, because they lack education for better jobs. Further, many unions work actively to exclude them
from their trades and organizations.
Today: Racial tensions in many U.S. cities are
high after the 2001 racial riots in Cincinnati fol-
Today: More than one-third of all black families lives in poverty, while 10 percent of white
families can be officially classified as poor. The
percentage of black high school graduates going on to college is nearly the same as that of
white high school graduates, but a far smaller
proportion of blacks than whites complete high
school.
400,000 blacks who had served during the war returned home, many were dismayed to find that their
service to the United States did not mean that they
would finally achieve the respect and dignity necessary to participate fully in the American dream.
To make matters worse, thousands of blacks who
had moved from the South to work in northern factories during the labor shortages of the war years
were thrown out of their jobs to make room for returning white soldiers. As racial resentment grew
between the two groups, violence spread throughout the country. In the South, lynchings increased
alarmingly, and in 1919, over seventy blacks were
murdered by white racists who feared black advancement as an assault on southern culture. Conditions were hardly better in the North, and in July
1919, tensions came to boil in Chicago after a black
youth swimming in Lake Michigan drowned after
being stoned by whites who feared he was swimming too close to their exclusive beach. Chicago
erupted in rioting that continued for over a week
and subsided only after the deaths of 38 people. In
other northern cities, similar violence erupted, leaving 120 Americans dead, the majority of whom
were black.
The greatest black populist response to this
racial tension and violence was organized by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who made New
York’s Harlem the international headquarters for
his Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). Before Garvey arrived in New York in
1916, he had become convinced from his experiences in Central and South America, the Caribbean,
and Europe that blacks were at the bottom of the
social ladder throughout the world, that they suffered the greatest indignities, and that they usually
performed the most backbreaking and menial labor. Inspired by the writings and work of Booker
T. Washington, Garvey sailed to New York in 1916
intent on raising money to build a black university
in Jamaica, which—like its model, the Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama—would become a haven
where blacks could gain the educational tools necessary for equality with whites.
As Garvey traveled throughout the United
States, he quickly rose to prominence for his great
skills as a public speaker and for his poignant message that blacks should not be ashamed for being
black, but instead should be proud to be descendants of Africans. African civilizations, Garvey
• 1920s: Racial tensions result in violence in a
number of U.S. cities, including Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia.
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told his appreciative audiences, had reached astounding heights when European civilizations were
little more than savage tribes of hunters and warriors. God, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, Garvey insisted, were black, and Negroes who worshiped a
white God were doomed to perpetuate Negro inferiority. Preaching this message of black pride in
speeches and through his newspaper, Negro World,
Garvey’s UNIA rapidly expanded its membership.
By the time of the Chicago riots, the UNIA boasted
two million members and included thirty-eight
chapter organizations around the world, its leader
affectionately dubbed “the Black Moses” for his
work to uplift his people from oppression.
In August 1920, Garvey organized the First International Convention of the Negro People of the
World in Harlem. For an entire month, black delegates from around the globe met, delivered
speeches, and called for universal black solidarity
to resist racial inequalities in the United States and
worldwide. These delegates drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,
which listed many of the injustices inflicted on
blacks around the world and solutions for those
problems. Before the conclusion of the convention,
Garvey made explicit his own dream that one day
Africa would be liberated from its white colonial
masters and would once again be ruled by black
leaders. This new Africa, Garvey believed, was the
natural and rightful home of all the world’s blacks,
and they would return to their ancestral homes
where they could determine their own fates unmolested by white racism and domination.
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dangerous and fostered racial violence. In 1923,
Garvey was convicted of fraud for promoting sales
of stock in his Black Star Line, a shipping company he had started four years earlier to create a
black-owned industry and that would eventually assist in the back-to-Africa migration. After a year
and a half of appeals, Garvey began serving his sentence in 1925. For the next two years, angry blacks
led rallies, some attracting over 100,000 protesters,
demanding that the government release Garvey. In
1927, President Coolidge had Garvey set free, but
immigration officials immediately declared him a
dangerous criminal and ordered his extradition to
Jamaica. Far from the international limelight, Garvey’s fame and influence faded, as did his Back to
Africa movement.
Critical Overview
Garvey’s call to make Africa a black Zion became known as the Back to Africa movement. Although few American blacks ever immigrated to
Africa, Garvey sent several delegations to Liberia
in 1922 and 1924 to discuss the possibility of creating settlements for the thousands of blacks Garvey anticipated would rush to create a new Africa.
Liberia eventually rejected the idea of these settlements, but Garvey and his organization continued
to advocate for Africans to establish their own
homeland. While Hughes did not ever consider returning to Africa, “Dream Variations,” written at
the height of the black nationalism movement,
shows the influence of the notion of Africa as the
true homeland for American blacks.
Hughes was a true Renaissance man, a term meaning that he was expert in many different fields, but
he received his best critical response for his poetry
and fiction. Sometimes, though, critics would not
recognize that Hughes was writing for an undereducated audience and would accuse the writer
himself of being remedial and marginally talented.
Harry Allan Potamkin, for example, recognized
what Hughes was trying to do—use the American
folk music tradition in poetry—but he did not think
it was a feat that took much skill. “Whatever value
as poetry the Negro spirituals or blues may have,”
Potamkin wrote in the Nation, “duplicate spirituals
or blues have only duplicate values. In the conformation of the inherent qualities of these indigenous
songs to an original personal intelligence or intuition lies the poetic performance. And Mr. Hughes
has not made the material so perform.” In short,
Potamkin believed the blues could be made into
good poetry if an author put his original ideas into
his work, but he did not think that Hughes added
enough of himself. Famed novelist James Baldwin,
reviewing Selected Poems of Langston Hughes in
the New York Times Book Review in 1959, categorized the works as “poems which almost succeed
but do not succeed, poems which take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very
difficult simplicity of experience.”
By the mid 1920s, Garvey’s movement was
unraveling nearly as quickly as it had gained prominence. Garvey’s own uncompromising personality
made him many enemies, and the head of the FBI,
J. Edgar Hoover, believed Garvey’s message was
The majority of critics, though, appreciate and
approve of Hughes’s attempt to bring traditional
Negro art forms to literature. In the words of
Theodore R. Hudson, reviewing Hughes’s last book
of poetry in the CLA Journal, “His message is both
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valid and valuable. Hughes depicts with fidelity the
Negro’s situation and the Negro’s reaction to this
situation. Hughes has the discerning and accurate
eye so necessary for the poet, and his poet’s eye
and hand are synchronized.” Most critics today
would agree with Hudson’s judgment.
Criticism
Uma Kukathas
Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. In
this essay, Kukathas maintains that because of the
nature of the poem as a dream, an understanding
by the reader of Hughes’s background, political beliefs, and influences aids in interpretation and discovering new levels of meaning in Hughes’s poem.
Upon first reading, Hughes’s poem appears to
be merely the recounting of a simple dream by an
unnamed speaker. The action and images of the
poem are so spare, at first sight seeming to reveal
only that the speaker is having a dream about dancing in a “place in the sun” and then resting underneath a tree until night descends. But of course, the
poem is about much more. Indeed it is striking that
in seventeen uncomplicated lines Hughes is able to
suggest such a wealth of ideas, touching as he does
on subjects like the social reality of the 1920s, Black
Americans’ spiritual connection with Africa, and
racial prejudice. Part of the reason he is able to call
up so much in so short a space is that the subject of
the poem is a dream. As with all dreams, to understand fully the significance of what is represented
requires a significant amount of interpretation, imagination, and background knowledge. As anyone who
has helped a person close to them decipher the meaning of a dream knows, close scrutiny of the dream’s
images coupled with an intimate knowledge of the
dreamer can yield impressions or truths that are not
at all obvious at the outset. Thus “Dream Variations,” more than most poems, benefits not only from
a careful probing into the action and imagery in the
poem itself but also an examination of the
poet/dreamer and his beliefs, social background, and
main concerns. A fuller understanding of the poem
comes when the reader can understand the layers of
meaning that are contained within the simple descriptions presented, and these layers of meaning
may be uncovered by gaining a deeper understanding of the poet and his interests and influences.
“Dream Variations” is one of Hughes’s early
poems, written in 1924 when he was only twenty-
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two. Although he had not yet established his reputation as a poet, during this time, Hughes was gaining some renown as an important new voice in
African-American circles. Also, despite his young
age, the poet had already lived a full life. His parents separated when he was young, and he lived
with his grandmother and then his mother in Kansas
and Illinois, where he felt the full effects of the
racism against African Americans that was a feature of life in the United States. By 1921, Hughes
had also visited his estranged father several times
in Mexico, taught school there, traveled to Europe
and Africa, moved to New York City, and attended
Columbia University. After leaving Columbia in
1921, he began to publish in Crisis, the historic
magazine of the N. A. A. C. P. founded by the poet
W. E. B. DuBois.
In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes discusses his early years, noting his loneliness growing up; his love of books and ideas that provided
an escape; the racism he encountered in school,
where he and other Black children were routinely
placed separately from the other pupils; being
called names and hurt physically by White youngsters; being denied entrance to the movie theater
because of his color; and his friendships with White
students at school. He mentions that his closest
friend in school was a Polish boy who also had to
put up with racial remarks from his own teacher
and classmates. Growing up in poverty and a constant sense of insecurity, Hughes says in his autobiography, he “believed in books more than in people,” and sought his escape from reality by reading.
He also talks about his travels to Europe and Africa
in 1923. His six-month voyage along the West
Coast from Dakar to Luanda he describes as transforming. He says
when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa, Motherland
of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! Africa! . . .
it was . . . the Africa I had dreamed about—wild and
lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees
tall, the sun bright.
In Europe, Hughes traveled, worked as a
dishwasher, and met the distinguished AfricanAmerican scholar Alain Locke, who invited him to
submit his poems for publication in a special issue
of Survey Graphic. Returning to New York,
Hughes met a number of distinguished literary figures, won awards for his work, but had to continue
working at menial jobs in hotels and restaurants in
order to be able to live.
All of Hughes’s early experiences contributed
profoundly to his poetry, and this is especially ap-
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parent in “Dream Variations,” which calls up a
number of the poet’s early experiences in compressed form. As Hughes himself notes in The Big
Sea, he was from a young age a dreamer, someone
who sought to escape his present reality by being
transported to other worlds through books. The present reality that was particularly disturbing to him
was the racism that held his family in poverty. In
the first stanza of “Dream Variations,” the speaker
describes his dream and in doing so expresses that
he wants to escape his present reality by being in
a far-away place. He says, “To fling my arms
wide,” to dance, to rest at nightfall—“that is my
dream.” He is not only describing the dream he has,
but explains that these things happening in the
dream are what he wishes for. The sun conjures up
an image of warmth and well-being as well as of
life. The image of arms flung wide and dancing signifies a sense of freedom, happiness, and abandon.
The tree seems to symbolize a sense of rootedness.
When he announces “That is my dream,” the
speaker makes clear that the things in his dream are
what he longs for and also shows he is aware that
his present reality is much different from the preferred state of things.
The poet, then, dreams of the things he did not
and does not have as a child and young man growing up in the United States. He wants to be transported to a different place, where there is a sense
of warmth and well-being that he did not experience as a Black American, where he feels rooted
and secure, and where he can enjoy the freedom
that is denied to him in his present situation. As he
describes his dream, longing for a different type of
life—one of happiness and freedom—Hughes calls
up the social reality of the time and place he was
growing up and shows its severe limitations. It is
a place where he and his family struggled but could
not enjoy the fruits of their labor because of the
discrimination faced by every African American.
At the same time, Hughes suggests that there
is a very real place where he can enjoy the things
in his dream. The images he uses in the poem are
strikingly similar to those he uses as he describes
his initial impressions of Africa in The Big Sea. In
“Dream Variations” the speaker dreams of dancing
wildly in “a place in the sun” and of resting in the
evening beneath a “tall tree,” which in the second
stanza becomes a “tall, slim tree.” In his autobiography, Hughes finds Africa “wild and lovely” and
comments on the brightness of the sun and the tall
palm trees. He also thinks of Africa as the homeland of all people of African descent, admires the
“dark and beautiful” people, and is struck by the
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[I]t is striking that
in seventeen uncomplicated
lines Hughes is able to
suggest such a wealth of
ideas, touching . . . on
subjects like the social
reality of the 1920s, Black
Americans’ spiritual
connection with Africa,
and racial prejudice.”
fact that he is African like them. In “Dream Variations” the poet admires the night and is struck by
the fact that he is dark and black like the night. By
using certain key images, Hughes suggests in the
poem a spiritual connection with Africa, the true
homeland to him and other Black Americans because blackness there is celebrated and not condemned, and because in Africa happiness and freedom can be found.
But despite the fact that the poem celebrates
and admires darkness and night, it shows light and
dark, pale and black complementing each other and
playing important roles in the speaker’s dream. The
speaker is dancing in the sun, during the “white
day.” He then rests at evening until dark night falls
gently. In the second stanza, the speaker says he
rests at “pale evening” before night comes tenderly.
In both the stanzas, there is balance of white and
black, dark and light. The white day, warmed by
the sun, is a time for dancing. The pale evening is
a time for rest. And black night falls to gently end
the day. The speaker certainly identifies with darkness, blackness, and the night, but the poem makes
clear that light and dark are important elements in
his dream of well being. This sentiment, it could
be argued, expresses Hughes’s understanding and
insistence of the humanity of both Whites and
Blacks. At an early age Hughes made friends with
and understood the experiences of both White and
Black Americans. He was profoundly aware of his
own heritage of color and much of his life’s work
was devoted to giving voice to particularly Black
concerns, but he was cognizant of the dangers of
all kinds of racism, whether directed at Blacks or
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• The great American civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, “I Have
a Dream,” (1963) looks forward to a time when
all races can participate fully in the “American
dream.”
• In his poem “Harlem” (1951), Hughes asks his
famous question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” referring to the fact that African Americans’ hopes for political and economic freedom
were not able to be realized because of racist attitudes.
• The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of AfricanAmerican Culture, 1920–1930 (1996), by Steven
Watson, traces the influential African-American
cultural movement, of which Hughes was a key
figure, that changed the way black intellectuals
and artists thought about themselves.
• Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories of
Growing Up Black in America (2000), edited by
Laurel Holliday, presents the stories of thirtyeight African Americans who explain what it is
like to grow up black amidst racial prejudice.
• Race Matters (1995), by Cornel West, is a collection of highly readable essays that explore the
problem of race in America.
Whites. “Dream Variations,” then, seems to indicate this mindfulness of the essential humanity of
people of all backgrounds, Black and White, as the
poet identifies strongly with darkness and blackness but shows both light and dark as important aspects of the speaker’s dream.
Hughes’s simple work, when examined closely
in the context of the poet’s life and influences, has
levels of meaning that make reading it a rich and
rewarding experience. The use of the dream as a
subject is particularly appropriate subject for a
poem, as both dreams and poems invite interpretation through the use of imagination and knowledge.
No doubt more detailed investigation of Hughes’s
personality, interests, and life combined with cre-
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ative interpretation of the poem’s ideas and symbols will yield further insights into this seemingly
straightforward but interestingly complex poem.
Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Dream Variations,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English
and specializes in writing about various forms of
literature. In the following essay, Poquette explores
Hughes’s use of imagery and pattern in his poem.
Langston Hughes became popular during a period in the 1920s commonly known as the Harlem
Renaissance, a time when a number of black writers emerged in society. Unlike many of his peers,
who focused on poems about middle and upper
class blacks, Hughes strived to be the voice of the
common African-American people. In one of his
first poems, “Dream Variations,” Hughes imagines
two African scenes of natural tranquility, which are
a stark contrast to the oppressive, lower-class life
most African Americans faced during this time period in “white” America. Through the poem’s imagery and pattern, Hughes emphasizes this contrast,
leaving the reader with a sense that the inequalities
that blacks face in white society are unnatural.
“Dream Variations” is a poem set in Africa, a
place with which many African Americans have
tried to identify, especially during the Harlem Renaissance. “Many of Hughes’s best early poems explored the nature of, and the beauty in, the African
element of African American identity,” says David
Roessel in American Writers: Retrospective Supplement.
Although “Dream Variations” depicts African
scenes, it is also infused with overt black and white
references that invoke the racial discrimination of
1920s America, and paint it as unnatural. This main
polarity (or opposite)—black Africa as natural
vs. white America as unnatural—is emphasized
throughout the poem through the use of several differences in imagery and pattern.
The poem is divided into two stanzas, which
feature extremely similar wording. It is the subtle
differences in these words that give the poem its
strong imagery. The most noticeable difference in
image is the change from the first stanza to the second. In the first stanza, the persona—the voice that
speaks to the reader in the poem—rests “beneath a
tall tree,” while in the second stanza, through the
use of a metaphor, the persona becomes the tree.
A close comparison of the two stanzas in the
poem reveals that the tree, which represents nature,
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is the ideal to which the human persona in the first
stanza strives. The first stanza begins as follows:
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
With the exception of the first line, which is
identical in both stanzas, the poet changes certain
words in this four-line sentence from the first stanza
to the second. In the second stanza, the first line
changes from “In some place of the sun” to “In the
face of the sun.” As a product of nature, the tree is
more in touch with other aspects of nature, like the
life-giving sun. Because of this, a tree is always “in
the face” of the sun, while a human can only ever
be in “some place” of the sun.
In the third line of the second stanza, “To whirl
and to dance” from the first stanza gets upgraded
to a much more emphatic “Dance! Whirl! Whirl!”
When the persona is a tree, the dancing and
whirling is more vibrant. This is a curious idea, because in the physical world, a human has more capability for movement than a tree. By giving the
tree the greater freedom of movement within the
context of the poem, Hughes demonstrates the fact
that a tree with physical roots has more freedom
than a black man in a white man’s society, which
is supposed to be free.
One of the most striking differences comes in
the change from “the white day” in the fourth line
of the first stanza to “the quick day” in the corresponding line of the second stanza. Since days are
not usually described as “white,” the word takes on
a special connotation, or emotional meaning, within
the poem. The days in the first stanza are “white,”
because the black persona is in a white man’s
world, and so is forced to view the world as white.
But a tree, like other forms of nature, does not view
the world in terms of black and white. Instead, the
tree views the day by the passage of time. For a
tree, one day in its long life would, in fact, be
viewed as “quick.”
The imagery in the second half of each of the
stanzas serves to further the idea of Africa as pure
and natural. In both stanzas, night is viewed as a
gentle or tender force, which is “dark like me” and
“black like me,” respectively. The persona, both as
a man and a tree, identifies with the color and comfort of the dark night, which symbolizes the protective quality of Africa. This is opposed to
Hughes’s white world, where all things “black” or
“dark” are looked upon with mistrust or seen as inferior.
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In Hughes’s America,
African Americans were
denied the American dream
of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, and
many leaned toward their
native Africa to find hope
and the fulfillment of their
dreams.”
These examples serve to illustrate the differences between the artificiality of humanity—
especially as it existed in a racially oppressed
America—and the purity of nature, as embodied by
the ideal African homeland.
In other poems, Hughes lashed out at white
America, using angry language to express his views
toward racial discrimination. But with this poem,
and certain others, he took a different approach to
express his views. “Prejudice does not always stir
Hughes to resentful poetic tones,” says James A.
Emanuel in his entry for Twayne’s United States
Authors Series Online. “He sometimes turns toward nature, toward innocent forms of life, to suggest that racial discrimination is a hybrid creature
of man-made, aberrant principles.”
Hughes’s dream is to live in a world that embraces the simplicity of nature, as in the Africa of
his heritage. This simplicity is also emphasized by
the pattern of the poem. Nearly all of the words in
“Dream Variations” are one-syllable words. The
words are chosen for their ability to sum up a concept simply, so that the reader is left with a concrete image, without having to struggle with the
difficult or unfamiliar words that some poets employ.
This simplicity is extended from the words
themselves to the lines of the poem. The first eight
lines of each stanza share the same end rhyme
scheme, in most cases repeating the same end word
from each line in the first stanza to its corresponding line in the second stanza. It is only the ninth
and last line of the first stanza, “That is my dream!”
that is missing from the second stanza. Many critics have commented on this conspicuous omission.
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Emanuel suggests that the ninth line in the first
stanza “should have been removed,” while R. Baxter Miller, in The Art & Imagination of Langston
Hughes, suggests that the top heavy structure with
a long first stanza and shorter second stanza signifies “the possible dwindling of the dream” through
the progression of the poem.
However, if viewed from a simplistic standpoint, the extra line in the first stanza serves to inform the reader that the persona is in fact dreaming, something that a reader would not know
otherwise. So if this is the case, why is it not mirrored in the second stanza, as with all of the other
lines? In the second stanza, the persona is living as
a tree. If a reader is to assume that nature is the
ideal, as Hughes goes to painstaking lengths to
demonstrate, then the tree, a form of nature, is already living that ideal, and has no need to dream.
Other patterns in the second stanza support the
notion that the persona is literally thinking like
a tree. The fifth and sixth lines, “Rest at pale evening . . .” and “A tall, slim tree . . .” make deliberate
use of an ellipsis at the end of each line, whereas
in the first stanza, each corresponding line has no
punctuation at all. As stated before, the subtle differences between corresponding lines in the two
stanzas of this poem point to Hughes’s greater intentions. In poetry, ellipses introduce a pause into
the reading, causing the reader to deliberately slow
down and ponder the effect of the words. In this
case, the use of ellipses signifies the deep, natural
resting quality of the tree. This is unlike that of the
human persona in the first stanza, whose rest is
touched upon briefly but is not felt as fully by the
reader.
This double pause in the poem sticks out even
more due to the pattern of the remainder of the
poem. Throughout “Dream Variations,” Hughes
uses a line of action followed by a line of passive
description. For example, look at the first four lines
of the second stanza:
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
In these lines, one can see how the first and
third lines feature an active verb or verbs, while the
second and fourth lines feature a passive description. This alternating pattern of action/description
is repeated throughout, and it sets up a sing-song
pattern, which causes the reader to race through the
poem. If read according to the punctuation, a reader
needs only halt for a long period of time at two
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points: the eighth line of the first stanza, “Dark like
me—” and the double-pause of the tree’s rest, mentioned above. By tying these two points together
through pauses, Hughes links the “dark” persona to
the tree that is resting at pale evening, and the tree
that is peacefully resting in the second stanza fulfills the dream of the “dark” human persona in the
first.
In Hughes’s America, African Americans were
denied the American dream of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, and many leaned toward their
native Africa to find hope and the fulfillment of
their dreams. In The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol.
1, Arnold Rampersad noted that in this poem and
other poems “written in Africa, Hughes responded
emotionally to the most dangerous lies of European
colonialism,” which promised all Americans that
they could achieve their dreams. In the end, through
his carefully crafted poem that uses specific differences in images and pattern, Hughes expresses
his own dream: a life that mimics the freedom and
colorblindness of nature, as idealized by his natural, African heritage. This is a stark contrast to the
unnatural oppression and prejudice that Hughes and
other African Americans faced in the white America of the 1920s.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “Dream Variations,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Baldwin, James, “Sermons and Blues,” in New York Times
Book Review, March 29, 1959, p. 6.
Barksdale, Richard, Langston Hughes: The Poet and His
Critics, American Library Association, 1977, p. 4.
Brinkley, Alan, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History
of the American People, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1993, pp.
628–29.
Dickinson, Donald C., A Bio-Bibliography of Langston
Hughes, 1902–1967, Archon Books, 1967, p. 29.
Emanuel, James A., “Langston Hughes,” in Twayne’s
United States Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall & Co., 1999.
Garvey, Marcus, “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” in Modern Black Nationalism from Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, edited by William L. van
Deburg, New York University Press, 1997, pp. 24–31.
Hoagwood, Kimberly, “Two States of Mind in ‘Dream Variations,’” in Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall
1983, pp. 16–18.
Hudson, Theodore R., “Langston Hughes’ Last Volume of
Verse,” in CLA Journal, June 1968, pp. 345–48.
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Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Alfred
A. Knopf, 1940, pp. 18–26, 325.
Ikonne, Chidi, “Affirmation of Black Self,” in From Du Bois
to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature, 19031906, reprinted in Langston Hughes, edited by Harold
Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1989, pp. 151–68.
Lawler, Mary, Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalist Leader,
Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
Miller, R. Baxter, “Deep Like the Rivers,” in The Art &
Imagination of Langston Hughes, The University Press of
Kentucky, 1989, pp. 55–56.
Potamkin, Harry Allan, “Old Clothes,” in Nation, Vol.
CXXIV, No. 3223, April 13, 1927.
Rampersad, Arnold, “On the Big Sea,” in The Life of
Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 1986,
pp. 78–79.
Roessel, David, “Langston Hughes,” in American Writers:
Retrospective Supplement, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998,
pp. 19–214.
Further Reading
Berry, Faith, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem,
Lawrence Hill, 1983.
This biography of Hughes is written for a popular audience; it deals with the poet’s personal and family
life as well as his career as an artist.
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Emanuel, James A., Langston Hughes, Twayne Publishers,
1987.
Emanuel’s work provides a detailed examination of
Hughes’s works from a literary rather than a sociological perspective (which had been traditionally
used when looking at the writings of African Americans), emphasizing the writer’s variety of expression.
Jemie, Onwuchekwa, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to
the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1976.
Jemie provides an introduction to Langston Hughes’s
poetry limited to his collected poems (about a third
of the author’s output) with a brief glance at the prose
fiction, delineating Hughes’s major themes and techniques, especially as they relate to African-American
oral tradition.
Locke, Alain, “Youth Speaks,” in Survey Graphic, Vol. 4,
March 1925.
This article that appears in the issue of the journal in
which “Dream Variations” appeared in 1925, is written by the well-known African-American professor
of philosophy who championed the work of young
black artists. Locke praises the achievement of young
black writers of the period.
Miller, R. Baxter, The Art and Imagination of Langston
Hughes, The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.
Miller’s book is a detailed study that considers the
complex patterns of meaning in the literary imagination of Langston Hughes.
5 3
For a New Citizen of These
United States
Li-Young Lee
1990
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Li-Young Lee’s “For a New Citizen of These
United States” appeared in the poet’s second collection, The City in Which I Love You, published
in Brockport, New York, in 1990. Like the majority of Lee’s poems, this one is based on his memories of a turbulent childhood, beginning with his
family’s escape from Indonesia by boat in the middle of the night when he was only two years old.
The past often plays a significant role in Lee’s poetry, for it is something he feels is always there—
that, unlike a country or a prison, history is inescapable. But not all of the poet’s relatives and
friends who endured the same fears and upheaval
of life in exile share his notion of an unavoidable
past. “For a New Citizen of These United States”
addresses a “you” who is not specifically identified
but who appears to be an acquaintance of Lee’s
from the time of their flight from Indonesia. In this
poem, the person spoken to is not enamored of
things from the past, as Lee is, and seems not to
recall any of the events and settings that Lee describes. Although the poem’s speaker—Lee himself, in this case—pretends to accept his acquaintance’s lack of interest and real or feigned
forgetfulness of their shared history, his tone of
voice and subtle sarcasm make it clear that he is
frustrated by the other’s attitude. This premise
dominates the poem from beginning to end.
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Author Biography
Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in
1957. His parents were Chinese and were well educated and influential in their native country. Lee’s father was Mao Zedong’s personal physician while the
family lived in China, and his mother was a descendant of China’s provisional president, Yuan Shikai,
elected in 1912 when the nation was in transition
from a monarchy to a republic. The Indonesian government imprisoned Lee’s father not long after LiYoung’s birth. The older Lee’s interest in Western
culture did not sit well with the Southeast Asian leaders—he enjoyed opera, Shakespeare, the philosophical writings of Kierkegaard, and the Christian Bible.
In 1959, Li-Young’s father escaped from prison and
fled Indonesia with his family. They spent the next
five years traveling throughout Hong Kong, Macau,
and Japan before moving to the United States, where
they settled in Pennsylvania in 1964. Eventually,
Lee’s father studied theology at a seminary in Pittsburgh and became a Presbyterian minister.
The tumultuous early upbringing influenced
Lee throughout childhood and into his current middle age. But in spite of the family’s migration from
country to country, one constant was his exposure
to poetry—especially from hearing his father recite
it—and his familiarity with the King James Bible,
from which his father also frequently read. The
most dominating factor in the poet’s life was indeed his father, and much of his work reflects that.
Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona and the State University of New York at
Brockport. He has taught at various institutions, including the University of Iowa and Northwestern,
and his first two books of poetry won major awards.
In 1986, Rose won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and in 1990 The City in Which I Love
You—including “For a New Citizen of These
United States”—was awarded the Lamont Poetry
Selection of that year. Lee now lives in Chicago
with his wife and children.
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Poem Summary
Lines 1–2
The first two lines of “For a New Citizen of
These United States” are intriguing and somewhat
ambivalent. In poetry, the “I” in a poem should not
be confused with the poet him- or herself, and,
therefore, critics and reviewers typically refer to the
“I” as the “speaker” or “persona” when discussing
the work. But because Lee’s poetry is well documented as actual accounts of his past and of his
personal feelings toward it, one is safe in presuming the speaker here is indeed Lee. Given that, he
begins this poem by asking someone for forgiveness, but who that someone is, is not yet revealed.
The real ambivalence, however, falls in the second
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Adaptations
• A videocassette of Lee’s April 18, 1995, reading in Los Angeles was recorded in VHS format by the Lannan Foundation (Sante Fe, New
Mexico). Lee reads from his two poetry collections and his autobiographical prose poem The
Winged Seed and is interviewed by Shawn
Wong. The tape runs sixty-six minutes.
line, in which he compares death to an “irregular
postage stamp.” It is possible, of course, that what
the poet has in mind with this metaphor is just
that—in his own mind and not accessible to readers in general. But one who has read other poems
by Lee may liken this haunting, yet striking, imagery to his visions of a past that creeps up on the
present through a letter turning up years after it was
lost in the mail. The first poem in The City in Which
I Love You is called “Furious Versions” and contains the lines, “Memory revises me. / Even now a
letter / comes from a place / I don’t know, from
someone / with my name / and postmarked years
ago.” The postage stamp in “For a New Citizen of
These United States” is irregular with its old date,
and it reminds Lee of the deaths that occurred in
his past, both those of loved ones and those of citizens killed by soldiers in China and Indonesia.
Lines 3–5
In these lines, Lee admits that the flash of what
he imagined to be the “postage stamp of death” was
really only a moth that he has trapped in a piece of
richly patterned cloth (“the damask”), typical of
Oriental linens and fabrics. He also admits that
there is “no need for alarm,” but this first stanza
suggests the poet’s encumbered state of mind. He
is so fixated on his troubling memories that he mistakes a common insect for a tragic omen.
Lines 6–8
At this point, the reader has no reason to doubt
Lee’s sincerity in claiming that there is “no need
for alarm” and, in line 6, “no need for sadness” either. As the poem progresses, however, one sees
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that he is continually alarmed and saddened, by
both the past itself and his acquaintance’s lack of
response to it. In lines 7 and 8, Lee makes first
mention of the “you” in the poem, stating that the
person addressed is not reminded of the past by
“the rain at the window.” (Although one cannot tell
from the poem whether Lee’s acquaintance is male
or female, for the sake of simplicity here, the individual will be referred to as “he.”) Rain itself is
significant in this poem, and to Lee in general, because his family fled Indonesia in the springtime—
monsoon season in that part of the world.
Lines 9–11
The first hint of the poet’s frustration is revealed here as he describes a memory in vivid, yet
metaphoric detail, but his acquaintance does not appear to recall the same images. The “parlor” mentioned is the compartment of the boat in which his
family gathered when they escaped from Indonesia, fleeing the father’s persecution by government
officials. The reference to “nave” is pertinent in
Lee’s life because his father was a pastor in a small
church and Lee used to help him clean it. The shadow images indicate the fluctuation between despair
and hope that the escapees felt—“cloud-shadow”
implying darkness and doubt and “wing-shadow”
recalling the moth flickering in the light in the first
stanza, as well as the promise of flight and freedom. The “father-shadow” is a constant in Lee’s
poetry, for his father was the dominant figure in his
life and the son is forever in the older man’s
shadow. Together, cloud, wing, and father “confused the light” with continual movement, or fluctuation. Line 11 ends with a double meaning in the
word “flight”: It not only perpetuates the wing imagery, but it also represents the Lee family’s flight
from Indonesia.
Lines 12–13
Here, Lee describes the chaotic rush to escape,
his family battling both monsoon rains and winds
creating a “leaf-throng” all around, making it difficult to see as they tried to protect themselves from
harsh weather and approaching soldiers. In other
poems, Lee describes waves so high that the boat
seemed to sail underwater, and it is the tumultuous
mixture of wind-whipped leaves, soldiers, and the
ship’s flags that he believes “deepened those windows to submarine.”
Lines 14–17
Lee’s memory now turns to other places and
events in the history he shares with the acquain-
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tance, but he knows this recollection, too, is not
shared. Line 15 employs a touch of irony in that he
claims he “won’t mention that house” and then goes
on to do just that, including a description of what
others in the house, including the acquaintance,
were actually doing. “Lin” is probably Li-Young’s
older brother, Li Lin Lee, an accomplished painter
also living in Chicago. “Chung” and “you,” the acquaintance, may be Lee’s cousins or other relatives,
or they may be friends. “Ming” seems to be an adult
trying to keep the children quiet by singing to them.
Lines 18–21
These lines describe Lee’s memory of his
church experience as a young boy and of words
from the Bible—“garden, heaven, amen”—so
beautiful and so heavy that they “exhaust the heart”
with their hopeful, yet sad sounds. The irony is
even stronger at the end of line 21 as the poet says
he will “mention none of” everything he has just
mentioned in provocative detail.
Lines 22–23
Although the poet’s tone of voice seems soft
and melancholy as he recalls the events of his life
throughout this poem, there is an underlying bitterness that surfaces from time to time. Line 22 is
one of those times. The flippancy is obviously intended in “After all, it was just our life,” and his
sarcasm continues in the metaphor comparing one’s
life to only a few pages in a fat book of many pages.
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still figuratively a snide way of telling his acquaintance he should be more closely in touch with
what happened to their families long ago.
Line 32
Line 32 contains the central idea in “For a New
Citizen of These United States.” The bird metaphor
may simply be translated as “human beings should
look to the future (‘fly forward’) instead of trying to
live in the past.” This is apparently the philosophy
of Lee’s acquaintance, evidenced in the poignant
phrase “as you say.” This idea is a key element in
the poem because it expresses the exact opposite of
Lee’s own philosophy—his own inescapable search
of the past to understand the present.
Lines 33–41
These nine lines reiterate the irony of Lee’s
claiming he will not do something and then proceeding to do exactly that. He says he “won’t
show,” “won’t hum,” “won’t . . . recall,” and then
he details what it is he won’t show, hum, or recall.
His recollections center on his mother and his acquaintance’s mother, both of whom still sing old
songs about the homeland together. Lee still hangs
on to family memorabilia, such as old letters and
his mother’s shawl, and thinks about the way she
sewed money into his coat lining before their
springtime flight from Indonesia. The acquaintance, of course, does not remember his own
mother preparing for whatever the exile might
bring, including separation.
Lines 24–27
These lines recall yet another memory from a
specific year and a specific place. Although the Lee
family reportedly fled Indonesia by boat, this scene
in 1960 implies that another part of the escape involved rail travel as well. Apparently other families were trying to leave, including the acquaintance’s. Lee notes that in the confusion of trains
pulling in and rain coming down, “we got separated,” as though the original intent was for their
families to flee together.
Lines 28–31
These lines imply that on the train, and perhaps on the boat leaving Indonesia, Lee was the
one who took notes on the events occurring around
him. That, of course, cannot be true, for he was
only two years old. But in many of his poems, Lee
blends, or intentionally confuses, the past and present to call attention to the difficulty in separating
them. Here, he vaguely states that “one of us” wrote
things down, but if that is not literally correct, it is
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Lines 42–43
The poem ends by returning to Lee’s sense of
bitterness over his acquaintance’s lack of interest
in their history together, but the flippancy that surfaced in line 22 sounds more like resignation now.
In saying “it was only our / life,” he repeats the
earlier idea, but he now adds, “our life and its forgetting.” This tension between forgetting and remembering is another constant in Lee’s life and in
his poetry. As he ages, he tries to concentrate less
and less on history in favor of life today. Perhaps
the last line of this poem is his recognition that letting go may not be easy but it is necessary.
Themes
Inescapable History
The most dominant theme in “For a New Citizen of These United States” is the poet’s own
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Topics for
Further
Study
• If your family had decided to emigrate to another country when you were a young child,
what are some of the things you think would be
different about your life? Try to think of both
positive and negative aspects and write an essay
describing your life in a foreign country. Include
information about that country that differs from
the one in which you now live.
• Lee is frustrated because his acquaintance cannot or will not share in his memories of their
past lives together. Think of a time when you
could not get someone to understand or share a
feeling that is very important to you. Write about
your approach to the situation, how you handled
the “rejection,” and how the situation was resolved.
• Write a poem titled “Birds Fly Forward.” What
does the metaphor mean in your poem? How is
it different from or the same as Lee’s meaning?
• Li-Young Lee has a famous brother, Li Lin Lee,
who is an accomplished visual artist. Discover
some of his paintings, in books or online, and
write an essay describing one you like in particular. Give specific details to explain why it
appeals to you.
inability to escape the memories of his family’s
troubled past. Tied directly to the personal tragedies
are the social tragedies that Lee witnessed as a
young boy. The childhood he recalls is full of persecution and fear: tales of his father’s imprisonment in an Indonesian jail and the family’s eventual life in exile after the father’s escape. For Lee,
the present is continually infiltrated by the past. His
thoughts, actions, and beliefs are all shaped by the
disturbing history that followed him throughout
five years of traveling from country to country and
into his youth and adulthood in the United States.
From start to finish, this poem discloses an ongoing struggle between living in the past and letting it go. Lee pretends to be able, even if unwill-
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ingly, to stop bringing up events that occurred years
ago, but what he says he will do and what he actually does are two different things. He cannot help
but to talk about the house where he and his family and friends hid, about the chaos on a crowded
railway platform, about his mother’s belongings
and the day she prepared him for their escape. Even
the common experiences of the present—a moth
flying by or “rain at the window”—remind him of
death, shadows, and windows covered with water.
Some may be tempted to call the poet’s persistent
thoughts an obsession, one that he should try to get
over. It is difficult, however, if not impossible, for
anyone who has not been through the turmoil that
Lee’s family has experienced to understand the relentless memories of such horrible times. The poet
himself would be the first to admit the pain and
frustration of recurring thoughts that will not go
away, and in “For a New Citizen of These United
States” he is even apologetic about it. His first
words are, “Forgive me,” and later he claims his
mother’s letters and shawl have been “meaninglessly preserved.” But even though the last two
lines of the poem indicate the possibility of forgetting the past, there is little evidence elsewhere
to support Lee’s ability to so do.
Self-Alienation
A secondary theme in Lee’s “For a New Citizen of These United States” is actually a result of
the primary one. Because his thoughts are so centered on events of the past, he is often alienated
from friends and relatives who prefer to move on
and put history behind them. Who the “new citizen” is in this poem appears to be the acquaintance
addressed as “you,” but it could also refer to Lee
himself in regard to his arrival in America at the
age of seven or eight. Past and present tend to intertwine in much of Lee’s work, and the ambivalence mimics the melding of times and events in
his own mind. Some people, however—including
immigrants who suffered similar experiences in
their own histories—are put off by the constant recollection of times gone by. The acquaintance in this
poem is surely not as forgetful as Lee portrays him
(how could one forget such overwhelming
events?), but more likely he chooses not to remember. Perhaps this is what frustrates Lee the
most, but it is also what separates him from someone he wants desperately to connect with. Although
the reader does not get to “hear” the acquaintance’s
responses, one can easily assume his words: No, he
does not remember the house he “languished” in;
no, he did not record his life experiences; and, no,
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he does not remember his mother preparing him to
flee the country. The most penetrating and revealing statement attributed to the acquaintance is
“birds . . . fly forward.” In one line, he is able to
strike down what it takes Lee forty or more to say.
And it is the poet’s desire, or need, to relive the
past that alienates him from those who shared the
experience, but not the fixation.
Style
Free Verse
Lee is noted for his “plain talk” poetry, written in free verse without many poetic devices, such
as alliteration or meter, and hardly any rhyme, if at
all. Most of his poems could be written in prose
and not lose their meaning or impact. The only poetic function that does tend to surface in his work
is an occasional potent metaphor, often surprising,
sometimes elegant in tone and image.
In “For a New Citizen of These United States,”
the first striking metaphor comes right up front, in
the opening stanza. The comparison of a black
moth to the “irregular postage stamp of death” is
dark and beautiful at the same time. So, too, are the
“cloud-shadow,” “wing-shadow,” and “fathershadow” images in the second stanza, along with
the notion of windows “deepened . . . to submarine.” Surrounding these metaphors, though, is
plain language that simply conveys the poet’s
thought at that moment. He says, “There is no need
for alarm. And / there is no need for sadness,” and
he opens the third stanza with, “But you don’t remember, I know, / so I won’t mention that house.”
Lee intertwines the simple language with powerful imagery throughout this poem, with probably
the most compelling metaphor occurring in line 32.
“But birds, as you say, fly forward” is a very
straightforward, common sense piece of information, but its significance lies in what it represents
rather than what it literally means. It is arguably the
most important line in the poem and is clear evidence of Lee’s ability to speak in plain English and
still startle the reader with remarkable revelation.
Historical Context
Only a few decades after its declaration of independence from England, the United States of Amer-
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ica became known as a melting pot, so named because of the number of immigrants who landed on
its shores from all over the world. For a while, this
influx of diverse groups of people was a welcome
sight, for it helped to “grow” the new country and
make it stronger. But personal bias and stereotypes
do not go away quietly, and before too long immigrants—especially those of color or distinguishable
physical features—found themselves the victims of
racism and unfair treatment in the work place, on
the streets, and in residential communities everywhere. Asian immigrants were no exception, and
in 1960 nearly two hundred years after gaining independence, the United States was still a hostile
place for many foreigners, including the Lee family who arrived that year.
Five years after the Lee’s arrival, the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, abolishing the discriminatory practice of fulfilling immigrant quotas
based on national origins, which had favored northwestern Europeans prior to that. Although the act
limited the number of people who could migrate to
America from both the western and eastern hemispheres, close relatives of those immigrants already
in the country were exempt from the quotas, so the
number of newcomers was still more than anticipated. By the time Li-Young Lee was writing poetry heavily influenced by his family’s history and
life in their new home, Asians were still pouring
into the United States, even though Asia itself had
registered the most rapid economic growth of any
nation on the planet. During the 1980s and 1990s,
the continent’s share of the world’s output increased from 10 to 20 percent. This growth is partly
attributed to American recovery programs after the
Vietnam War, as well as the American provision
of capital and technology to help increase industrialization. Probably the greatest factor in American contribution to Asian development is the purchase of huge quantities of Asian products in the
United States.
Lee’s parents were Chinese, but he was born
in Indonesia, called Tanah Air Kita, or “Our Land
and Water,” by its native citizens. The name refers
to the area’s geographical makeup, consisting of
17,508 islands connected by six seas in the South
Pacific. Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the
world and the fourth largest nation. Jakarta, the capital city and Lee’s birthplace, is on the island of
Java. During the mid-twentieth century, much of
Asia, including Indonesia and China, had governments that frowned upon free speech and freedom
of religion. Lee’s father encountered the repression
firsthand, and his promotion of Western religion
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and Western philosophy resulted in imprisonment.
But during the 1980s and 1990s, parts of Asia, including China, stopped overt repression of religious
activity, and, as a result, interest in various religions grew. Also during this time, many Chinese
citizens became enamored of American culture in
the form of McDonalds fast food, Coca-Cola,
trendy clothing, and rock music. Westerners delighted in this turn of events, believing it signaled
China’s move toward capitalist ideas and democratic values, but scattered news stories of young
Asians enjoying fashionable clothes, heavy metal,
and Big Macs did not tell the entire story. Economic reforms triggered negative, as well as positive, results. Inflation, unemployment, and corruption kept much of society in check, leaving the door
open for government to retain as much repressive
control as possible.
In 1989, America and other Western countries
had their hopes for China’s development dashed on
national television. When Chinese students staged
a demonstration in Tiananmen Square to draw attention to the continued repression, they were eventually met by troops and tanks. After the massacre
of the demonstrators, Chinese officials instigated a
wave of arrests throughout the country, resulting in
many Westerners fearing nothing had changed in
China at all. Since the Tiananmen Square debacle,
relations between China and the West have been
unstable, although signs of China’s willingness to
be part of the common world market are increasing again. While Indonesia’s development has
come along at a faster rate, that nation, too, still
struggles with political strife and religious repression. However, Indonesians are also no strangers
to the hustle and bustle of big business, entertainment, sports, arts and culture, and social life.
Though complete freedom may not yet exist in this
nation of over seventeen thousand islands, the possibility appears stronger for Indonesians than for
their neighbors in China.
Critical Overview
It is not unusual for a talented young immigrant
writer with a less-than-happy past to find an intrigued and sympathetic audience in America. Not
all of them, however, have the success of Li-Young
Lee, who seems to dwell beyond the normal level
on his family’s history as the basis for his poetry.
But in spite of this seeming obsession, Lee has been
accepted as a viable poetic voice since the publi-
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cation his first collection, Rose, in 1986. Critics
praise his candor in relating real-life experiences
and his ability to do so both forcefully and creatively. In an article for Melus, critic Mary Slowik
calls Lee’s writing “insistently in the present tense,
where past experience and future promise are fused
in the confusion of the present moment, intensely
and immediately experienced.” In Publishers
Weekly, Penny Kaganoff describes Lee’s second
collection, The City in Which I Love You, as a “journey through his wayward consciousness to relive
sad and strange moments, their emotional impact
somewhat deadened by the distance of his memory.” Of the poet’s style, Kaganoff says the “images are economical yet fluid, and his language is
often startling for its brave honesty.”
Honesty is a key factor for any poet who relies so heavily on troubling personal experiences
for inspiration. Without it, the writing can quickly
falter into pathos and sentimentality, turning off
readers who may feel a tug on their heartstrings but
not on their intellectual prowess. Lee’s work presents sorrowful stories, but it leaves a reader stimulated and thoughtful, as well as saddened. It has
appeared in major literary journals across the country, such as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review,
Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, and Lee has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship,
and various creative writing grants in Illinois and
Pennsylvania.
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill contends that Lee’s poem is
more an attempt to gain sympathy than to produce
a creative work.
If one defines pathos as the essence of a creative work that arouses feelings of sympathy or pity
in its audience, then Lee’s “For a New Citizen of
These United States” is, at least, an attempt to be
pathetic. Generally, this is a tricky issue for poets,
as they run the risk of turning off readers who may
consider the pathos simply whining. In Lee’s case,
the subject of his poem is real, the premise of his
poem is real, and the “new citizen” to whom it is
addressed is, presumably, real. Therefore, one is
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tempted to say that the poet is only reporting the
facts and his feelings about them and should not be
criticized for doing so. This poem, however, takes
“reporting” to a new level—a new low level of pityseeking that detracts from the power of what it is
actually about.
No one should doubt the enduring emotional
pain suffered by people whose childhood experiences were traumatic and, in some cases, lifethreatening. Insecurity and instability are surely
factors that result in many children growing up
fearful and mournful, unable ever to put away the
misery they encountered for so long. Li-Young Lee
and his family—as well as countless other human
beings living under tyrannical governments and
forced into exile—know all too well the mental, as
well as the physical, suffering that results from simply trying to stay alive in stressful conditions. They
know, too, that eventually landing in America may
have been a blessing but not one without some
drawbacks. “Foreigners,” after all, are up against
ethnic and racial biases no matter where they go.
And although the Lees may not have been under
the same threats to their physical well-being in
Pennsylvania as they were in China and Indonesia,
they still had to deal with the frustration and degradation of not being fully accepted in their new
home. Li-Young was only a boy when he arrived
in America, but after five years of moving from
one country to another, his troubles did not go away
upon making it to the United States—they just
changed in nature.
Given all that, is it not expected that a young
poet would use his creative ability as an outlet for
expressing sorrow and anger over the events that
so heavily burdened his life? Yes, of course. But
purely emotional expression is difficult to pass off
as creativity, especially if it is not very carefully
presented. The problem with “For a New Citizen
of These United States” as a literary work is its presentation; in particular, the irony tactic is too obvious and too frequent.
The first two stanzas of this poem are really
very remarkable in their intricate description and
metaphoric quality. The comparison between a
“postage stamp of death” and “a black moth” is an
engrossing thought, and the portrayal of various
shadows moving about “confus[ing] the light” is a
captivating picture to imagine. Unfortunately, the
poem takes a downturn in creativity beginning in
the third stanza with “so I won’t mention the
house,” which is the first time Lee uses the ironic
twist of describing what he has just said he would
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All this is, indeed,
heart-wrenching as actual
events, but as strictly
poetry, it slips into that
dubious area of pathetic
complaint.”
not describe. This may work once in a brief poem
(forty-three total lines, in this case), but in a longer
poem it becomes too obvious and trite. Lee does it
again in lines 21 (“I’ll mention none of it”), 33 (“So
I won’t show you letters”), 35 (“And I won’t hum
along”), and 37 (“I won’t . . . recall my mother”).
Granted, the repetition is intentional, and in some
poems repetitiveness can be an effective tool for
communicating a vital message in the work. But
when the recurring tactic strings together pathetic
descriptions of personal misfortune, it loses the
punch it may have otherwise had.
“For a New Citizen of These United States”
exhibits pathos in the details of the crowded railway platform where frightened families huddle in
the rain, losing track of each other in the melee; it
is exhibited in the stanza-long description of the
poet’s and his acquaintance’s mothers—their
singing nostalgic songs together, the old letters and
shawl Lee has kept for years, the memory of his
mother sewing money into his coat lining before
they attempted their escape. All this is, indeed,
heart-wrenching as actual events, but as strictly poetry, it slips into that dubious area of pathetic complaint.
It is interesting to ponder what may have saved
this poem from crossing the thin line between creative autobiography and autobiographical pathos.
Perhaps it is something as simple as expanding on
one of the most important lines in the poem: “But
birds, as you say, fly forward.” There is more
power—both in meaning and in simple poetics—in
this one line than in much of the drawn-out details
of Lee’s troubled past. If he had addressed at greater
length his acquaintance’s apparent philosophy on the
past, a more cohesive, more intriguing poem may
have resulted. Instead, Lee belabors the point of sorrowful memories and dismisses the beautiful
metaphor of birds flying forward—implying the de-
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Many people think of Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so forth, when South or Southeast
Asia is mentioned, but the Indian subcontinent
is a major part of this area of the world. Living
in America: Poetry and Fiction by South Asian
American Writers, edited by Roshni RustomjiKerns, is a comprehensive collection of work by
authors from the Indian subcontinent. Published
in 1995, these writings reflect the experiences
and concerns of predominantly middle-class,
English-speaking, educated South Asians living
in America, caught between two cultures and
struggling to define their identity.
• In 1999, Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita published Archipelago: Islands of Indonesia, from
the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred
Russell Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs
in the Twenty-first. This is a wonderfully illustrated book that follows the journey of a young
English naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace in the mid-1850s. It is a fascinating historical and biological look at Indonesia, a country
that comprises only 1.3 percent of the world’s
sire to look to the future—without second thought.
This quick dismissal likely stems from the fact that
Lee cannot escape the past and, therefore, the future
is almost insignificant to him. So why include the
line in a poem that is otherwise centered in history
and carries a tone of sarcasm and admonishment on
the part of the speaker toward the “you” he addresses?
Without it, the work would display no evidence whatsoever of its author’s acknowledgement that some
people choose not to dwell on their troubled pasts.
But with it, the poet has an opportunity to show his
recognition of the opposite philosophy, even if that
translates only into another chance to shoot it down.
The latter seems most plausible; after all, this wonderful line about flying birds is the beginning of one
of the most pathetic stanzas in the poem.
Perhaps it seems too harsh, unjustified even,
to criticize a poet who records the truth, as he sees
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surface but harbors nearly a quarter of the
world’s species.
• Jonathan D. Spence’s Mao Zedong, published in
1999, is one of the better biographies of the
“Great Helmsman” of Communist China, whose
personal physician, for a while, was Li-Young
Lee’s father. This book concentrates primarily
on Mao’s early life, including the poetry he
wrote to his first wife, but eventually depicts the
behavior and mindset of a colossal leader considered responsible for the deaths of some sixty
million people.
• Readers interested in Indonesian contemporary
history and society will enjoy Timothy Lindsey’s
lengthy but intriguing The Romance of K’Tut
Tantri and Indonesia: Text and Scripts, History
and Identity (1997). This book tells the story of
an American woman who established the first
hotel in Bali and, later in life, became known as
the revolutionary “Surabaya Sue.” Portraying
herself as a heroine of the Indonesian Revolution, Tantri eventually died abroad, forgotten by
most Americans and Indonesians alike.
it, and who is not afraid to wear his heart on his
sleeve, as the saying goes. Perhaps, but the heart
in this case is as stubborn as it is pitiable. It is not
just the repeated message of how bad life was in
his early years that diminishes the quality of Lee’s
work in this poem but also that he appears hostile
toward those who opt not to wallow in dark memories along with him. As a result, the poetry suffers. After considering “For a New Citizen of These
United States,” readers may feel more sympathetic
toward people who have endured hardships they
never will, but they may also feel cheated out of
the high-quality work that this poet is capable of
producing.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “For a New
Citizen of These United States,” in Poetry for Students, The
Gale Group, 2002.
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David Kelly
Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College
and an associate professor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and has
written extensively for academic publishers. In this
essay, Kelly explores the dark undertone to the
poem, finding it to be an indictment of the immigrant experience.
It is far too tempting to read Li-Young Lee’s
poetry in terms of the biographical facts of his life.
This is especially a problem in the case of a poem
like “To a New Citizen of These United States,”
which includes a few details that can be confirmed
as corresponding to the life the author has led. Like
Lee, the speaker of this poem came to America long
ago after a harrowing struggle against one or more
oppressive political systems, a life of hiding from
soldiers. But it is misleading to concentrate on the
similarities and to ignore the differences. In this
case, the differences lie in the details of the character’s life that the author has not chosen to share.
A conscious decision has been made about what
details to leave out and which to include, making
the character his own individual person. To fill in
details by matching given facts from Li-Young
Lee’s life would trivialize the poem’s artistic
achievement. The situation that is given in print
should be allowed to speak for itself, with no need
for any outside influence. In spite of the fine details that make the poem come alive, “To a New
Citizen of These United States” is not about its author nor about any particular people from any particular place; it is about the cultural experience of
becoming American.
This poem is one of those subtle, carefully calibrated artistic works that yields a slightly different
meaning with each reading. It starts out bestowing
its reader with a feeling of optimism toward the future and sadness toward the past, but with each successive reading its spirit of anger becomes more
clearly evident. The story it tells is about two
friends who have each escaped from a repressive
life and who have reunited in the United States.
Even without equating the speaker with the author,
it would be a fair guess to say that the inclusion of
a date here might mean the same to the character
as it would to Li-Young Lee. If so, the separation
would have happened when the poem’s speaker
was two or three years old, Lee’s age in 1960. There
is no indication of how old the poem’s New Citizen would have been then, or whether these two
were relatives, friends, or acquaintances, or what
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Even if one accepts
the fact that this speaker is
being insincere in his
modesty and that he wants
his insincerity to show
through his words as
sarcasm, there is still a
question of whom the
sarcasm is meant for.”
brings them together now; there is only the history
that they share, one of fear and suffering. A superficial reading might leave the impression that
the poem’s speaker avoids the subject of the past’s
horrors out of politeness, but that is taking his
words at face value. It leaves too many questions
raised but unanswered.
The poem’s initial impact is of one person, its
speaker, trying to connect with a person who has
presumably just crossed over into safety. This entails working around any mention of the difficult
conditions that they once shared. The title hints at
a much different poem, mentioning a transitional
moment that usually ranks with life’s most celebrated. To immigrants, new citizenship can be as
significant a rite of passage as marriage or childbirth, indicating a future overflowing with promise.
The title also uses the folksy, commercial phrase
“These United States,” common to popular magazines and textbooks, to imply that the New Citizen
is entering a happy community and can leave his
worries behind.
The poem introduces its dark side in the very
first few lines, with the mention of death, but it immediately undercuts the severity of this idea, explaining it away as a simple mistake. Ironically, this
“mistake” continues to be an image of violence
even after it is explained: The moth, for which the
speaker claims to have mistaken death, is captured
in a cloth of damask, likely made of silk, which
moths destroy. At the same time that it introduces
this sinister aspect, though, the poem also introduces its speaker’s polite, humble tone toward the
New Citizen. The first two words of the first line
are “forgive me.” With the mistaken impression,
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the newness promised by the title, and the gentle
begging for pardon, the poem starts in a hopeful
mood, subverting its frightening imagery of death
as a fluttering black moth. Like the moth in silk,
though, the poem also carries the hint of destruction that is obscured by opulent beauty.
The speaker of the poem is clearly struggling
to suppress some ideas that are unacceptable for
this reunion. Sprinkled throughout its lines is the
phrase “I won’t mention,” which belies a strained,
insincere form of humility. It brings up a subject
while pretending that it is not doing so. This
speaker actually seems eager to talk about the adventures of the past, which include hiding and escape, but he is held back from open discussion of
such matters. The idea implied is that the danger
that these two have overcome would gain validity
if they were to dwell upon it, allowing those who
terrorized them before to take control of their future. There is a strong implication in this poem that
the past needs to be buried so that when the mind
drifts toward times gone by, even while thinking
of the good things associated with those times, it
ought to be redirected away from such thoughts.
What comes out from reading the poem carefully is the speaker’s disassociation from this idea
of burying the past and his complete disdain for it.
Willful ignorance is not a poetic stance, although
this speaker seems to be willing to go along with
it. Each time the poem asks for forgiveness or mentions some aspect of the past that it says it will not
mention, the speaker draws attention to the struggle that he is putting up to remain silent.
The third stanza offers a perfect example of
this. In the second line, it begins, “I won’t mention,” and then it goes on to render a scene in full,
intricate detail, given the short space of a poem.
Three other characters are mentioned, and songs
and bells and specific words tickle the memory.
Lee’s use of sounds is one of the surest ways of
jogging memory, which means that the poem does
exactly what it says it is trying not to do, by bringing buried memories to the fore. In fact, in reference to the things just detailed, the stanza ends with
“I’ll mention none of it,” just to make the irony
clear to readers who might have been duped into
believing that the speaker really intended to avoid
discussing the past.
The speaker is, in fact, obsessive about the
past. The reference in the fifth stanza “faithfully”
chronicling the events that occurred in childhood
and since is, like the events themselves, given emotional importance by the meticulous details with
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which the written record is described: The words
“pencil,” “day-book,” and “rubber band” are all aspects that would not occur to someone who takes
the responsibility of recording history lightly. Under other conditions, the speaker’s explanation that
“one of us” kept this record could function as a unifying technique, as if it were irrelevant whether the
speaker or the New Citizen was the one writing all
of this down. Here, however, since there can be no
question that it is the speaker, the effect is sarcasm.
It adds emphasis to what the speaker has done to
keep the past alive and thereby highlights what the
New Citizen has not done in that same regard.
Given this tension between remembering and
forgetting and the speaker’s clear, strong support
for the former, it is hard to accept all of the poem’s
pretensions of humility. The frequent apologies in
the beginning and the vows not to speak of the past
in the poem’s middle lead the speaker to, in the
later stanzas, abandon his own personal beliefs with
such exaggeration as to summon up a fierce sense
of anger. He refers to treasured mementos, such as
letters and a shawl that he has held on to for
decades, as “meaningless,” although readers cannot really doubt their sentimental value. He
promises to forget the songs that his mother taught
him, even to forget his own mother, if the New Citizen is willing to do the same. The last half of the
poem has a bitter tone, full of pain and sorrow and
hatred, established by the phrase “After all, it was
just our life.”
Even if one accepts the fact that this speaker
is being insincere in his modesty and that he wants
his insincerity to show through his words as sarcasm, there is still a question of whom the sarcasm
is meant for. The most obvious candidate is, of
course, the New Citizen, whose past is so closely
tied with that of the speaker. The New Citizen is
presented as the one who cannot or will not remember the details of the house they hid in or the
mission bells or his mother. According to the poem,
it is the New Citizen who lives by the motto “birds
fly forward,” indicating that this person believes it
no more wise or practical for a human to examine
the past than it would be for birds to fly in reverse.
The New Citizen could be the speaker’s adversary in this, as the advocate of letting the past
go, but then one needs to ask why this person,
meant to hold up the opposing view from the
speaker, is never presented in the poem with any
clear personality. It would make sense that the details about the past would be obscured, given that
the New Citizen stands for forgetting and the
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speaker seems to have come to the United States
long ago. It does not make sense, however, that Lee
would not balance the speaker’s point of view with
the ideas of a character rendered with a respectable
degree of realness. Readers are not even given the
New Citizen’s age or gender nor told what part of
the world this person has come from. To argue effectively against a character who believes that the
past should be forgotten, it is important to know if
he or she has been fighting political oppression for
ten years, or twenty, or fifty; if the character is educated enough to appreciate the broad scope of history or if his or her sense of the world is based
solely on personal experience; and, most importantly, if this is a person so psychologically damaged by the struggle to emigrate that dwelling on
the past would only do harm. Without being told
these things, it would be unfair to criticize the New
Citizen, or to blame an unknown person wanting
to forget. Yet, the poem’s stance is accusatory,
showing the desire to forget, to be self-indulgent
and even cowardly. This is not the sort of point that
an intelligent poem like this would have to make
by hiding the truth about the title character.
The New Citizen and the country or countries
the New Citizen came from are irrelevant. The object of Lee’s sarcasm about forgetting must, by
process of elimination, be “these” United States,
and the malaise that would make a newcomer forget his or her entire previous life is citizenship itself. The new country is one of the few specific,
knowable elements given in the poem, the one thing
of which all of Lee’s readers would have some
knowledge. Though the country is not mentioned
after the title, it is quite easy to understand how, in
this piece, becoming a citizen of the United States
is equal to forgetting.
It makes sense sociologically: The obvious
side effect of the American “melting pot” that
brings all citizens together would have to be that
each individual loses the past that made him or her
unique while yet blending into the whole. The logical consequence of adapting to a “new” land is that
the old one, and all of the things associated with it,
would have to be left behind. It makes sense, too,
on a more personal level, that the speaker of this
poem would reserve such sarcasm for a cultural environment rather than at the old friend that he is
greeting. When the speaker says, “you don’t remember” or “it was only our life,” he seems to have
more pity than blame for his old friend. It is clear
enough that this speaker is angry and resistant toward someone who is trying to make both characters in the poem forget, someone who supports the
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idea that their pasts, individually or together, are
not worth holding on to: If it is not the unnamed,
repressive former country and if it is not the victimized New Citizen, then the next most likely candidate is the new country. As it appears here, the
problem of forgetting is a United States one.
New citizens are often so elated with their
achievement that they do not look at what could be
lost. There is nothing in this poem to suggest that
Li-Young Lee himself opposes the ideals that the
United States stands for, only that there is an inevitable inclination to forget the past when starting
an exciting new future. In this poem, the speaker
argues his points by pretending to believe the opposite of what he really does: He is apologetic when
most angry, and he claims to be ready to forget
when that is clearly the last thing on his mind. This
speaker is fighting a cultural battle so large and
complex that it could only be against his chosen
home.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “For a New Citizen
of These United States,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale
Group, 2002.
Sources
Kaganoff, Penny, “Book Review: The City in Which I Love
You,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 237, No. 30, July 27, 1990,
p. 227.
Lee, Li-Young, The City in Which I Love You, BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990.
Slowik, Mary, “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and
David Mura,” in Melus, Fall-Winter 2000, p. 221.
Further Reading
Hongo, Garrett, ed., The Open Boat: Poems from Asian
America, Anchor Books Doubleday, 1993.
This extensive collection of contemporary AsianAmerican poetry provides an in-depth look at the experiences, hopes, fears, and dreams shared by this
segment of the American population. It contains four
poems by Lee.
Lee, Li-Young, Book of My Nights, BOA Editions, Ltd.,
2001.
This is Lee’s latest collection of poems, again presenting lyrical, free verse work that fuses memory,
family, culture, and history. The book includes four
black and white drawings from the University of
Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery.
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—, Rose: Poems, BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986
This is Lee’s first collection of poetry. Compared to
The City in Which I Love You, it concentrates more
heavily on the poet’s relationship with his father and
the overwhelming influence the older man had on his
son.
—, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, Simon &
Schuster, 1995.
This book is as close to an actual autobiography as
Lee has yet come. Written in the form of a prose
poem, it is a beautiful, but haunting, recollection of
the poet’s past and his search for answers to the disturbing inner questions of his mind.
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Geometry
This poem was published in Dove’s first complete
book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner,
in 1980. “Geometry” like other poems in the same
volume, explores the dynamic between knowledge
and imagination. Through an evolving series of increasingly surprising and fantastic dramatic images, the poem takes the reader on a swift and fanciful excursion from indisputable knowledge (“I
prove a theorem”) to the realm of imagination. The
speaker of the poem seems to be suggesting that
the very act of attempting to impose intellectual
certainty results in the unleashing of a mysterious,
and ultimately wonderful, transformative force.
The geometrical “house” immediately “expands”
from what is known and certain, and suddenly the
speaker is no longer protected, but is “out in the
open.” The windows, those framed devices through
which the speaker observes the external world,
“jerk free” and hinge “into butterflies” in a transformation from rational thought to imagination.
The poet seems to be saying that where intellect
and imagination “intersect” there is “sunlight,” or
enlightenment, and that, in the end, it is the imagination that is “true and unproven.”
Rita Dove
1980
Author Biography
Born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, to well-educated parents, Dove is the daughter of Ray A. Dove, the first
African-American chemist to break the racial barrier in the tire and rubber industry, and the former
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Media
Adaptations
• Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, and S. E. Hinton are
featured on a 1999 video from Films for the Humanities, entitled Great Woman Writers.
• Journalist Bill Moyers presents an in-depth look
at Dove’s life and her writings in Poet Laureate Rita Dove, a one-hour videocassette produced in 1994 and released by Films for the Humanities. It was originally broadcast on PBS as
part of the Bill Moyers’ Journals series.
Rita Dove
Elvira Elizabeth Hord. An excellent student, Dove
was invited to the White House in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar, ranking nationally among the best
high school students of the graduating class of that
year. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Miami
University of Ohio in 1973—where she had enrolled as a National Achievement Scholar—and
graduated summa cum laude. The following year,
Dove studied at West Germany’s Tubingen University as a Fulbright scholar. This led to further
studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There she
met her husband, the German-born writer and journalist Fred Viebahn. In addition to her other
achievements, which include fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dove holds the distinction of having been the
first African American, as well as the youngest individual, to hold the post of United States Poet Laureate, a position she held from 1993 to 1995. Dove
lives with her husband and daughter in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is professor of English at the University of Virginia Commonwealth.
Poem Text
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
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• Rita Dove was the executive producer for Shine
Up Your Words, a 1994 television program
meant to introduce students to poetry. It is available from Virginia Center for the Book, in Richmond, Virginia.
• New Letters magazine produced the radio series
New Letters on the Air. This series is available
on audiocassette, including #305, Rita Dove,
which features the author reading and discussing
her poems in 1985.
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
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and above the windows have hinged into
butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.
Poem Summmary
Line 1
In this first line, Dove sets the stage for the
rest of the poem. The speaker asserts indisputable
rational knowledge (“I prove a theorem”) and immediately a mysterious force is set in motion (“the
house expands”).
Lines 2–3
In these lines, inanimate objects, which are the
product of rational thinking, take on living and even
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human characteristics: “the windows jerk free to
hover near the ceiling,” and “the ceiling floats away
with a sigh.” This attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects is known as personification.
Lines 4–6
In these lines, the mysterious force that dismantles everything that is known and certain continues. The walls disappear, “the scent of carnations leaves with them,” and suddenly the speaker
is no longer protected: “I am out in the open.” The
use of carnations may suggest a celebration of moving from one level of knowledge to another.
Lines 7–9
In the final tercet, the transformation is complete: “above the windows have hinged into butterflies.” Windows, rationally constructed frames
of perception, have been transformed into living
creatures of the imaginative realm, “sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.” The poet seems to
be suggesting that where rational thought and imagination intersect there is enlightenment. These
imaginatively transformed creatures “are going to
some point true and unproven.”
Themes
Order and Disorder
Geometry is the branch of mathematics devoted to understanding physical space in terms of
logical theorems. In Rita Dove’s poem “Geometry”
human beings’ ability to understand the world in
terms of logic is viewed as a mixed blessing. In the
first stanza, the expansion of a house can be taken
as a symbol that the intellect has conquered the limitations of the physical world, making what is there
bigger and better. The poem’s speaker seems to
control the dimensions of the house by understanding them. Up to this point, humanity’s ability
to understand the principles of order that already
exist in nature is presented as a marvelous skill because it has not only made the house possible but
has also improved beyond its original sense of order, creating this expansion.
By the second stanza, however, the poem raises
doubts about the overall worth of geometric order.
It shows the things that are lost when there is too
much importance placed on logical understanding.
The walls “clear themselves,” presumably of art
works that have been hung on them, which relies
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Rewrite an existing geometric proof, explaining
all of the steps in the proof in your own words.
• Dove has said in interviews that poetry is the
meeting of words and music. Explore the relationship between music and geometry and explain it in a poem.
• Research the ways in which butterflies have
changed and relocated in the past thirty or forty
years to adapt to the growth of the human population. Report on their fate: Are they becoming extinct or “going to some point true and unproven”?
• Of all flowers, Rita Dove chose to note that it
was “the scent of carnations” that disappeared
when the theorem was proven. What are the associations that people have with carnations?
Talk to a florist and then make a chart of the
characteristics of carnations that might be ruined
by excessive logic.
• Find an event that occurs in everyday life that
you find mysterious and develop your own theorem to explain it. Try to follow the form of a
mathematical proof in your explanation.
on a sense of disorder that has no place in logical
theorems. Flowers then lose their scent because
their fragrance does not fit into geometric equations.
The joys of life are the disorderly and illogical ones,
which cannot be appreciated when humans focus
strictly on their ability to create order.
In the end, the poem finds a peaceful compromise between order and disorder by observing that
the untidy elements that give life pleasure can never
be completely deadened by theorems but will always be able to escape them. The windows, made
by humans with the help of geometry, have some
element to them that makes them as natural and free
as butterflies, with the sunlight shining off them in
a way that is aesthetically pleasing but not measurable by geometry. The last line refers to “some point
true and unproven,” expressing the confidence that
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the natural world has its own order that exists independently of the geometric sense of order.
Beginning and Ending
In a world that thinks that logic is the only really important thing, the proof of a geometric theorem might be considered an end unto itself. The
proof may be the start of a different road of scientific inquiry, as scientists and mathematicians apply the information from the theorem to some practical use, but that one particular theorem has been
proven, marking an end to a line of inquiry. In this
poem, though, Dove presents the proof of the theorem as the beginning of the physical world’s independence. Abstract thought, such as geometry,
has been seen as confining the essence of nature in
the past, but this poem shows that nature’s essence
can never be captured in a theorem. It is a neverending resource. As many times as humans can create logical models of the physical world, the world
has even more mysteries that go beyond all logic.
Just when it might seem that geometry has made
the pleasures of art and flowers vanish, as depicted
in the poem, the physical world asserts itself again.
In this poem, man-made windows are no more
contained by logic than are butterflies. Both have
“unproven” qualities about them that go beyond
their mathematical qualities, which is why the
poem presents them, in the end, as escaping. As
Dove presents it, no one logical proof can offer
complete understanding of the physical world, but
instead it represents the start of a new line of inquiry in the quest for knowledge about reality,
which is constantly elusive.
Absurdity
This poem presents a struggle against the constraints of logic. It is a warning that the clearly defined view of the world that is sought by mathematics is too limited, because it only presents a
small segment of reality. To make her readers think
about reality in ways that go beyond logic, Dove
presents them with a sense of reality that is unfamiliar and unexpected. By weaving absurd notions
throughout the poem, she is able to counter the human predisposition for logic with the equally strong
tendency toward imagination.
Of course, it is absurd to state that a mental act
like proving a theorem can cause a physical result
like making a room expand, but it is exactly the absurdity of such a statement that forces readers to
reconsider the situation being described. Describing a natural and predictable physical reaction
would not pique readers’ curiosity: when Dove de-
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scribes things that could not happen, she challenges
her readers’ assumptions about what they do and
do not know. Mathematical equations do not make
windows float or walls turn transparent, but the
poem does raise the issue of how these imaginary
consequences resemble the actual goals of geometric proofs.
Style
“Geometry” is a contemporary American narrative
poem. It is like traditional, formalist poetry only in
its organization into stanzas. The stanzas are of
equal length of three lines each known as tercets;
this organization conveys a sense of geometrical
symmetry even though three is an uneven number.
The poem employs no formal rhyme scheme. It is
written in free verse, which means it uses no set
pattern of meter, but contains its own unique accents and rhythms. The poet chooses consciously
where to break the lines, and does so to produce
the sounds that make its ultimate rhythm.
Historical Context
Euclidean Geometry
Most principles of geometry upon which mathematicians base their work today—and for the past
twenty-three centuries—are related to the theories
and methods first recorded around 300 B.C.E. by
the Greek writer Euclid. His comprehensive work
on mathematical theory, The Elements, was probably heavily based on the work of his predecessor
Eudoxus, who had been a student of the philosopher Plato. Euclid refined Eudoxus’s theories,
along with geometric principles that were the results of generations of mathematicians. His Elements, written in Egyptian Alexandria, has been a
central influence for twenty-three centuries, from
the Hellenistic world after the conquest of Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire, to the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic Empire, into the medieval
world and on to today.
The Elements is a comprehensive treatise that
brings together geometry, proportion, and number
theory, tying them all into one complete theory for
the first time. It is divided into thirteen books. The
first six are about geometry. At the heart of Euclid’s geometry are five postulates. A postulate is
a rule that is assumed to be true and does not have
to be proved, as opposed to a theorem, which needs
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1980: The United States Department of Education is developed, comprised of a staff of seventeen thousand full-time employees.
Today: Some people feel that the centralized
Department of Education should be disbanded
because it cannot adequately understand local
issues that affect schools’ environments.
• 1980: A study by UCLA and the American
Council on Education finds that college freshmen express more interest in money and power
than at any time in the past fifteen years. It is
the beginning of a period that came to be known
as The “Me” Decade.
Today: After a long period of economic stability in the 1990s, many students take economic
stability for granted. Colleges are seeing renewed interest in careers that are not focused on
proving. Euclid’s first three postulates have to do
with construction. For instance, the first one states
that it is possible to draw a straight line between
any two points. The second and third postulates
deal with defining straight lines and circles. The
fourth postulate states that all right angles are equal.
The fifth postulate was to become a challenge to
the mathematical community for centuries to come.
It states that two lines are parallel if they are intersected by a third one with identical interior angles. This postulate assumed many facts about parallel lines continuing on for infinity. Euclid himself
was said to be uncomfortable with the absolute
truth of this statement and declared it to be a given
truth only after some hesitation. Its acceptance was
a factor that defined a set of geometric theories as
Euclidean geometry.
Non-Euclidean Geometry
For centuries, mathematicians tried either to
prove Euclid’s fifth postulate right once and for all
or to find the overlooked element that proved it to
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accumulating wealth, such as mathematics and
poetry.
• 1980: Humanity’s understanding of the universe
expands with the findings of Voyager I, an unmanned space craft that made new discoveries
about Saturn’s moons as part of its three-year,
1.3 billion-mile journey.
Today: Plans are underway to send two unmanned space crafts to Pluto, the farthest planet
in our solar system.
• 1980: The United States Supreme Court finds,
in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty that a
man-made life form—specifically, a microorganism that could eat petroleum in cases of
spills—can be patented.
Today: Biotechnology and genetic technology
are growing scientific fields and lucrative sectors of the stock market.
be wrong. In 1482, the first printed edition translating Euclid’s work from Arabic to Latin appeared,
stimulating the progress. During the 1600s, various
mathematicians rewrote the fifth postulate in ways
that helped redefine such concepts as “acute angle”
or “parallel” in new ways. By 1767, the French
writer Jean Le Rond d’Alembert referred to the
problem of parallel lines as “the scandal of elementary geometry.”
In the early nineteenth century, there arose various schools of geometry that rewrote the assumptions, creating whole systems of understanding
space without having to accept the fifth postulate.
Collectively, these schools of thought came to be
known as non-Euclidean geometries. There are two
different types of non-Euclidean geometry, each relying on a different understanding of the concept
of parallelism. Those that assume that there is no
such thing as a “parallel” line that will fail to eventually meet the original one are called “elliptic
geometries”; those that assume that there can be
multiple lines passing through a point that will par-
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allel the original line without touching it are referred to as “hyperbolic geometries.”
Three mathematicians, working independently
of one another, came up with systems of geometry
(almost at the same time) in the beginning of the
1800s, all of which left out Euclid’s problematic
fifth postulate. Carl Frederich Gauss is credited
with being the first of them. Gauss disliked controversy and was unwilling to disagree with the prevailing view that Euclid’s geometry was the inevitable, indisputable truth, so he devised his
system in private and did not publish his findings.
In 1823, Gauss read the works of Janos Bolyai, a
Rumanian whose non-Euclidean theories were hidden in his introduction to a book by his father, who
was also a famous mathematician. Though Bolyai
could not have known of Gauss’s results, his theories were similar. In 1829, a Russian, Nikolai
Lobachevsky, who was himself unfamiliar with the
work of Gauss and Bolyai, published his own work
of non-Euclidian geometry. These three gave rise
to a new way of conceiving of space, changing the
assumptions that had been put into place by Euclid
more than two thousand years earlier. It is just this
sort of advancement of knowledge, of restructuring assumptions that were previously taken to be
indisputable truth, that Rita Dove considers in her
poem “Geometry.”
Critical Overview
Critic Nelson Hathcock, writing Critical Survey of
Poetry , says that while Dove “can exult in the freedom that imagination makes possible,” she also
demonstrates in her poems that such imaginative
liberty has its costs and dangers. He writes about
“Geometry”: “Dove parallels the study of points,
lines, and planes in space with the work of the
poet. . . . Barriers and boundaries disappear in the
imagination’s manipulation of them, but that manipulation has its methodology or aesthetic.” For
example, in “Geometry,” the voice of the poem tells
us: “I prove a theorem.” Critic Robert McDowell,
writing in Callaloo about Yellow House on the Corner, praises Dove’s “storyteller’s instinct,” her
“powerful images,” and “her determination to reveal what is magical in our contemporary lives.”
Well-known critic Helen Vendler, in a 1991
article in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, says that
Dove “looks for a hard, angular surface to her poems,” and that “She is an expert in the disjunctive.”
By this, Vendler means Dove is an expert in dis-
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unity or, or that she is very good at expressing an
opposition between the meanings of words.
Criticism
David Kelly
Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College
and an associate professor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and has
written extensively for academic publishers. In this
essay, Kelly examines reasons why it would be a
mistake to include Dove’s poem in the tradition of
anti-scientific poetry.
It would be very easy for readers to oversimplify the message that can be found in Rita Dove’s
poem “Geometry,” taking the poem to be nothing
more than yet another burlesque of humanity’s endless fascination with intellectual order. Read
lightly, the poem does in fact seem to suggest that
the drive to make order out of chaos is a vain and
hopeless one that is doomed to failure. It begins
with a blunt, triumphant declaration of success, as
the speaker announces proof of a theorem. After
that, the poem does not portray geometry as any
sort of mastery of the world, but instead things go
haywire: the house expands, the ceiling fades away,
the odors of nature vanish.
These are not the results that are expected to
follow proving a theorem, and their illogical nature
must be particularly offensive to the mathematician
who tried to find some sense of order with the initial proof. Predictability is the point of geometry;
when chaos results, it can seem like the poem’s
speaker, and mathematicians in general, are
doomed to fail. This interpretation is supported by
a long-standing tradition that the arts have of presenting rational thought as an affront to nature, creating some sort of battle zone between the natural
and the rational.
It is one of the most basic questions about being human, and Dove handles it with such sublime
grace that readers could easily miss the overall significance of what she says. Philosophers have long
divided human essence into two parts, recognizing
the distinction between our mammalian bodies that
make us part of the physical world even as the
purely human capacity to reason separates us from
the physical. In recent centuries, poets have tended
to side with nature, presenting reason as a form of
corruption that alienates humanity from the rest of
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the natural world. Just because this has been the
trend, though, and even though the poem does approach serious thought playfully, still there is not
enough evidence for reading “Geometry” as an assault on the weakness of logic.
The ancient Greeks, whose ideas have formed
the basis of Western thought, recognized this basic duality in the human condition, representing it
in the forms of Apollo, the god of (among other
things) light and therefore of logic and truth, and
Dionysus, the god of fertility and of wine, whose
followers celebrated irrationality. Their concept
of humanity’s divided essence has come down
through time to the present day, when it is still
thought that “too much” logic will lead to an orderly but sterile, emotionless existence, whereas
the absence of logic leaves one in the realm of animal instinct, at the mercy of unexpected violence
and unforeseen occurrences. The Greeks may
have worshipped Apollo and Dionysus equally,
but the fear of favoring one too heavily over the
other has caused supporters to divide rigidly into
two camps.
In general, most fields of human endeavor can
be seen as drawing on both their intellectual
achievement and their physical contact with the
natural world. Architects, for instance, cannot design purely theoretical buildings without any recognition of the terrain and the atmospheric conditions
that those buildings will be housed in; even physicists, who deal with concepts that are too minute,
grand, or old for human experience, find that their
theories are pointless if they cannot be supported
by some real-world evidence. Geometry is one of
the most abstract of cerebral pursuits, with only the
thinnest relationship to immediate reality. Poetry
was once a field of abstract thought, although it has
become increasingly focused on the world’s physical nature.
This is, to a large extent, the legacy of the romantic movement that began at the end of the eighteenth century. It followed on the heels of the Enlightenment, when the intellectual world focused
on applying scientific methods to understanding
human behavior. The French and American Revolutions, for example, were Enlightenment byproducts, and one can see in them the shift from
political order based on tradition to political order
based on rational principles, such as the rule of the
majority. As with most intellectual movements, romanticism is marked by its movement in the direction opposite from the movement that came before—in this case, from intellectualism to
physicality. The romantic response to the Enlight-
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Proving a theorem
should provide a sense of
completeness, but in this
line there is less a sense of
liberation than of
vulnerability.”
enment was to focus attention on humanity’s relationship to nature. If logic is a set of ideas that can
be transferred from one situation to another, the romantics turned away from shared knowledge to focus on the subjective experience of the individual
writer; if logic is used to find ways to channel water, build bridges, and traverse mountains, romanticism focused on appreciating but not controlling
the natural world. The common use of the word
“romantic,” referring to love within a personal relationship, offers insight into the nature of romanticism; romance emphasizes personal experience
and is generally accepted to be beyond of the rules
of logic. To apply geometric theorems to romantic
love would strike most people as heartless and cynical. In its extreme, romanticism would reject the
intrusion of any and all such mental designs.
The age of romanticism has long since faded,
but its most enduring legacy is the bond forged between poetry and nature. Poetry is, of course, a
cerebral event, built of words, not of flesh or earth.
Though some poetry can be instructive or contemplative, most poetry offers straight, unexplained description, or at least relies heavily on the physical
evidence that humans know from their five senses.
There is a basic distrust, in modern poetry, of ideas
that the poet spoon-feeds to the reader, and so poetry instead moves to capture the physical experience with words. Some poets have extended their
distrust of theorizing to a deep resentment and suspicion of all logic. From Whitman to Eliot to
Neruda, there is a clear path of poets who have been
resistant to order, with an assumption that logic and
creativity cannot exist at the same time and that one
must therefore give way to the other. Since this has
been the prevailing trend for the past century or
two, it is understandable that readers might assume
“Geometry” to be an attack on the insufficiency of
words.
7 3
G e o m e t r y
What
Do I Read
Next?
• The best poetry of the early part of Dove’s career is collected in Selected Poems, an anthology
of works from The House on the Yellow Corner,
Museum, and Thomas and Beulah, which won her
the Pulitzer Prize for 1987. Selected Poems was
published by Pantheon Books in 1993.
• Dove is also a novelist. Her book Through the
Ivory Gates, published by Vintage Books in
1993, tells the fictional tale of a young black
artist, whose life is much like the author’s, who
returns to her home in Akron to run an artistsin-schools program.
• W. S. Merwin’s poem “The Horizons of Rooms”
is similar to “Geometry” in the way that it contemplates the ways that humans surround themselves with logical constructs of their own making, forgetting about the independent world of
nature that goes beyond human order. It is found
in Merwin’s 1988 collection The Rain in the
Trees, published by Knopf.
• Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer” expresses sorrow at the
ways that scientific knowledge narrows one’s
experience of the world. It can be found in Walt
Whitman: The Complete Poems, edited by Francis Murphy, published by Viking Press in 1990.
• Other poems like “Geometry” can be found in
Against Infinity: An Anthology of Contemporary
Mathematical Poetry, initiated, collected, and
edited by Ernest Robson and Jet Wimp, published by Primary Press in 1979.
• “Ode to Numbers,” by the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, is a short poem that looks at math in the
same spirit that informed Dove. It can be found
in the anthology Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda,
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, published
in 1990 by University of California Press.
• Linda Pastan’s poem “Arithmetic Lesson: Infinity” is included in her collection Carnival
Evenings: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1998,
published in 1998 by W. W. Norton Company.
7 4
In fact, the imagery Dove uses in the poem
does lend itself to be interpreted as being antilogical. Though the first stanza presents the proof
of a theorem as an uplifting experience, with the
windows and ceiling floating up as if all of the
weight of the physical world had been rendered irrelevant, the second is clouded with hints of the
theorem’s unintended side effects. Walls are
cleared of paint, paper, or anything else that may
have adorned them; flowers lose their fragrance.
The second stanza ends with “I am out in the open.”
Proving a theorem should provide a sense of completeness, but in this line there is less a sense of
liberation than of vulnerability. Readers who see
this poem as another example of art rejecting science will focus on the second stanza, with the implication of the danger it carries.
It does not help that the poem’s stance toward
geometry is not cleared up in the final stanza, which
is, if anything, more ambiguous than the previous
two. The physical room that the speaker describes
does experience an uplifting sense of freedom from
the same proof that took the walls away. Does this
mean that finding the proof is a good thing because
it has liberated the physical world (giving manmade windows the independence and beauty of natural butterflies, for example) or that the proof is
bad because life is only tolerable in the places that
have escaped the deadening confines of geometry?
The poem does not explicitly say, but it does have
several aspects that should lead readers to accept
intellectualism and not treat it, as so many poets
have, as the enemy.
One clue is that this final stanza, though open
to interpretation in several ways, clearly is meant
to evoke a mood of hope and optimism. The dominant images are of sunlight and truth, and the poem
does not say that either has suffered from the proving of the theorem. If reality is escaping from
geometry here, it isn’t being aggressively pursued,
indicating that its escape is part of the overall plan.
In fact, the final word, “unproven,” loops the
process back to the opening salvo, “I prove a theorem,” indicating that even something as intellectual as a geometric proof is a part of the cycle of
nature.
A minor point, but one still worth mentioning,
is the poem’s structure. It does not follow any strict
rhythm or rhyme scheme, but it does have a geometric symmetry, with three stanzas of three lines
each. Such a structure could be meant to parody
the rigors of geometry, but if this were the case,
Dove could have made the case better by using a
P o e t r y
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G e o m e t r y
sing-song pattern to mock the lack of inspiration in
formal thought. Instead, the limited use of regular
structure implies that order can, in a limited way,
be of some good.
It is too simple to say that logic and instinct
are mutually exclusive, that the world only has
room for nature or rationality, but not both. Obviously, both can come together: The combination of
reason with physicality is what defines humanity.
Readers who have become accustomed to seeing
poets and other writers take sides in this conflict
are used to reading the works of extremists, who
either warn that humans might become unfeeling
machines if mathematical order prevails or that barbaric destruction will rule if mathematical precision is forgotten. Usually, poets tend to favor instinct over reason. It is the self-expressive thing to
do. Rita Dove is too intelligent to deal in halftruths, however, and “Geometry,” a poem that
seems simple and light, refuses to take the easy way
out. This poem is too intelligent either to embrace
or to reject logic blindly but instead establishes its
place in the vast strangeness of the universe.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Geometry,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Judi Ketteler
Ketteler has taught literature and composition.
In this essay, Ketteler discusses the way in which
Rita Dove makes a comparison between geometry
and poetic form.
The poem “Geometry,” by Rita Dove, is a
poem about ideas and space and the way in which
ideas and space represent possibility and liberation.
A mathematical science, the discipline of geometry revolves around precision and around measurements that add up to an organic whole to prove a
scientific truth. The human mind has the capability to create such precision and order, to make sense
of what would otherwise be chaos.
By titling the poem “Geometry,” Dove alerts
the reader as to the subject of the poem. Unlike a
“riddle poem” (such as Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”), this poem makes its
metaphor explicit—in this case, the comparison of
geometry and poetry. The reader then begins reading this poem thinking about the science of geometry and brings with him- or herself ideas about
geometry and what it means. Simply defined,
geometry is the branch of mathematics that deals
with the relations and measurements of lines, angles, surfaces, and solids. Most students study
geometry at some point in their schooling and, as
V o l u m e
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Nothing in all
Emerson’s writings is more
eloquent and popular than
some bits of his patriotic
verse.”
part of their learning, have to memorize theorems,
proofs, and formulas. Geometry is exact; a measurement is what it is; an angle is what it is—there
are no grey areas. Whether the reader likes or dislikes geometry, these are some of the perceptions
he or she may bring to this poem upon glancing at
the title.
If, by chance, the reader has forgotten his or
her high school geometry, the first line brings it all
back: “I prove a theorem and the house expands.”
The word “theorem” is very much associated with
geometry, and proving theorems is a main tenet.
The speaker immediately takes ownership of the
poem, as well as the action of doing geometry. The
first line highlights the setting of the poem nicely
as well. The reader can imagine a school-age girl,
inside of her house, working on her geometry problems. Dove is deliberate in her choice of verbs for
the first line. She doesn’t equivocate or say “I
study” or “I grasp”; instead, she says, “I prove”—
a strong statement. The speaker is clearly both confident and competent in her geometry skills.
The second part of the first line is even more
interesting: “the house expands.” There is a causal
connection; the house expands because the speaker
proved a theorem. The house even takes on human
characteristics. The last two lines of the first stanza
showcase this personification: “the windows jerk
free to hover near the ceiling, / the ceiling floats
away with a sigh.” The mood is one of lightness.
The softness of “hover” and “with a sigh” suggests
this is a peaceful transformation. The house is expanding beyond its walls. The walls are, in fact,
ceasing to exist. And the liberating force is the theorem, which the speaker has proven to be true.
There is a way in which the house in this poem
stands in for the mind, especially in the way that it
expands. Literary critic Therese Steffen writes in
her book Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and
Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction and Drama:
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G e o m e t r y
Two slightly different readings are imaginable: Either the house metaphorically portrays the mind, or
the mind-blowing expansion blasts the house apart.”
In any case, it is the mental powers at work that cause
the shift from solid to soft. What was once a stable
structure is drifting apart. In the same way, what was
once a stable knowledge base is drifting too—
expanding outwards and upwards.
The reader might think about childhood drawings of a house—very angular, consisting of a box
with a triangle roof, a rectangle door and two box
windows, usually crisscrossed with a “t.” As a
physical space, the house is very much a center of
geometrical shapes—walls, doors, windows,
floors, ceilings, and furniture. But it is also a center of ideas; in other words, of cultural space.
Therese Steffen reads the difference between physical space and cultural space in this way: “Cultural
space, as distinguished from place and location, is
a space that has been seized upon and transmuted
by imagination, knowledge, or experience.” This is
a useful distinction because it helps us separate the
metaphorical from the actual. If we speak in literal
terms, we know the actual house isn’t actually expanding; rather, the cultural space the house represents is expanding—namely the mind of the
speaker.
As the poem progresses to the second stanza,
the structure of the house continues to destabilize.
“As the walls clear themselves of everything / but
transparency, the scent of carnations / leaves with
them. I am out in the open.” That last line of the
second stanza is very powerful—why is the speaker
“out in the open”? Why has this geometry caused
her to lose her grounding? Even sensory perception has faded away with the carnations. Critic Helen Vendler, in her book The Given and the Made,
reads this as an experience of “pure mentality”: “As
the windows jerk free and the ceiling floats away,
sense experience is suspended; during pure mentality, even the immaterial scent of carnations departs.” The speaker is one with her mind—outside
forces do not seem to matter. Her surroundings
have become “transparent,” leaving nowhere to
hide. One way to read “openness” is that the
speaker’s foundation of knowledge has been so altered, the “walls” around her mind so shaken, that
all of the limits of imagination and understanding
that previously held her back have now vanished.
There is great liberation in the transparency because it allows her to see beyond what she previously thought were the limits.
Though some readers may love geometry and
see unlimited possibilities in mathematical science,
7 6
to claim that theorems and geometry problems are
inherently beautiful and liberating is still a hard sell
for many math-fearing readers. Dove isn’t speaking strictly of geometry, though. Just as the house
can be read as a metaphor for the mind, geometry
itself has a metaphorical quality, especially as it relates to Dove’s true love: poetry. Vendler understands the poem “Geometry” in this way:
It is a poem of perfect wonder, showing Dove as a
young girl in her parents’ house doing her lessons,
mastering geometry, seeing for the first time the coherence and beauty of the logical principals of spatial form. The poem ‘Geometry’ is really about what
geometry and poetic form have in common.
Both geometry and poetry concern space. Simply speaking, geometry takes a logical approach
and studies the relationship of objects to the space
around them. Poetry takes a more fluid, less tangible approach in that it “studies” the inner space of
the mind and the mind’s relationship to thoughts
and ideas. Poetry and geometry are alike in that
they both seek truth. Geometry is guided by logical principles: If x and y are true, then we can make
a statement about z, and it must be true as well.
While this is a mathematical way of thinking, it is
also highly poetic. There is poetry in the thought
process and in the belief that the truth is important
in that it helps us to organize our world and understand our place in it. Theorems are as much
about shapes and angles as they are about human
beings. The speaker in the poem “Geometry” is
swept away by these thoughts and connections, and
her world is altered as a result.
The experience of “pure mentality” continues
through the third and final stanza. There is a sense
of a great transformation in the final lines: “and
above the windows have hinged into butterflies, /
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected. / They
are going to some point true and unproven.” Butterflies are often symbolic of beauty, wonder, and
freedom. Here, the windows have actually transformed into butterflies. Solid materials like wood,
brick, and glass have changed into brightly colored,
delicate wings. Steffen remarks: “This liberating move from the initial “prove” to the final unproven . . . metamorphoses the wallbound windowframes like earthbound caterpillars into butterflies.”
The windows of the house, which provide only a
limited view on the world, are exchanged for a
more expansive view through the eyes of butterflies. They are flying away, as the speaker says, “to
some point true and unproven.”
The last line of the poem suggests that there is
much more still to be discovered. The speaker be-
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S t u d e n t s
G e o m e t r y
gins the poem by “proving” a theorem. This sets
the initial outward movement into action. This new
knowledge leaves the speaker left out in the open,
without solid walls to shield and limit her. Her entire relationship to the world has shifted by the last
stanza. The solid windows have “intersected” with
the liberated butterflies—an intersection of an old
way of thinking and the new way of thinking and
looking at the world. Another way to read the line
“sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected,” is to
understand it as the intersection of geometry and
poetry—the meeting point of mathematical science
and emotional introspection. In that intersection is
true liberation, which causes the curious, wellrounded mind to continue searching for truth in the
world.
This is a poem about poetry and about the
beauty of ideas and human thought processes. But
it does not exist in a vacuum. Thinking about the
larger social implications for this poem enriches the
reading of it. The speaker in “Geometry” experiences a liberation brought on by learning something
new about herself and the world around her. The
saying “knowledge is power” comes to mind. There
is great power in the implications of this poem—
the sense of wonderment increases with each
stanza, as boundaries disappear and possibilities
loom. By proving the theorem, a whole new world
opens up to the speaker, and it is a world where
windows can transform into butterflies.
In short, education is the real stimulus behind
the speaker’s transformation. And Dove, a highly
educated woman, not to mention former poet laureate of the United States, certainly knows the value
of education. Much of Dove’s poetry speaks to the
African-American experience. This poem does not
so much speak to that experience as it does to the
value of education, which is certainly relevant to
the African-American experience. Education is
wonderful in that it brings about personal enlightenment, but it is also the way out of poverty and
despair. Poetry and abstract ideas about space and
people’s relationship to the world may seem far removed from the social and cultural realities of
everyday working people, particularly poor people
who are more concerned with basic needs. However, as the final lines of “Geometry” suggest, there
is a key intersection—whether it be the intersec-
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tion of rational thought and emotion, of thought and
action, or of old and new—that can lead to liberation.
Source: Judi Ketteler, Critical Essay on “Geometry,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Hathcock, Nelson, Critical Survey of Poetry , Magill, 1991,
pp. 954–61.
McDowell, Robert, “The Assembling Visions of Rita Dove,”
in Callaloo, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter 1986, pp. 52–60.
Steffen, Therese, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and
Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction and Drama, Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Vendler, Helen, “A Dissonant Triad,” in Parnassus: Poetry
in Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1991, pp. 391–404.
—, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Harvard University Press, 1995.
Further Reading
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press,
1994.
This renowned modern philosophical text, first published in 1964, explores poetry’s relationship to the
measurable, physical world.
Dove, Rita, The Poet’s World, Library of Congress, 1995.
This publication actually consists of the texts of two
addresses that Dove made to the Library of Congress
while she was poet laureate. Her view of poetry’s
overall significance and her goals as an individual
poet are emphasized.
Mlodinow, Leonard, Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, Free Press, 2001.
Dove’s poem assumes that its reader has a sense of
what geometry is about. In this book, Mlodinow
traces the history of geometry by discussing the major figures who have shaped modern thought, giving
a funny, spry spin to a topic that students can sometimes find dull and dense.
Steffen, Therese, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and
Place in Rita Doves’ Poetry, Fiction and Drama, Oxford
University Press, 2001.
In one of the only books analyzing Dove’s overall
career, this recent publication looks at the issues of
spatial concept that are raised in “Geometry.”
7 7
The Horizons of Rooms
W. S. Merwin
1988
“The Horizons of Rooms,” from W. S. Merwin’s
1988 collection The Rain In the Trees, published
in New York City, is a solid example of the late
style of one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets. Merwin’s work began in his postcollege years in the 1950s with a strong, intellectual mastery of the classical poetic forms. By the
time of his 1967 collection, The Lice, he had developed a unique voice: terse and angry, the poems
in this collection did without punctuation, as if what
they had to say was too overwhelmingly personal
for the writer to bother with conventions of grammar. The Lice was Merwin’s best-known book,
with over a dozen reprintings, leading a generation
of poets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to copy
his style to express their own social concerns. Merwin’s later poetry shifted its focus toward the destruction of the environment and began showing
more and more rumination on history, especially
natural history. These subjects are explored in “The
Horizons of Rooms.”
This poem reflects on the way humanity has
come to accept the concept of “rooms” as a defining part of existence, blocking out any sense of nature in the process. It reminds readers that rooms
have actually been in existence for just a small fraction of the large scope of world history and gives
an example of how making a room in a cave allowed for survival in prehistoric times. The problem, as Merwin presents it, is that people no longer
see nature for what it is, only that it is outside of
rooms, making even the widest open places just an
7 8
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
T h e
H o r i z o n s
o f
R o o m s
interlude between one room and another. “Many
have forgotten the sky,” the poem tells readers, and
the problem is getting worse every day.
Author Biography
William Stanley Merwin was born on September
30, 1927, in New York City. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He was raised in Union City,
New Jersey, and then in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In
the 1940s, he attended Princeton University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1947 and going on
for just one year toward his graduate degree in modern languages. It was at Princeton that Merwin began writing poetry, with the encouragement of the
noted literary figures R. P. Blackmur, Herman
Bloch, and the poet John Berryman. He left there
for Europe, where he earned his living for several
years as a language tutor, living in France and Spain
and Majorca. From 1951 to 1954, he lived in London and worked as a translator for the British
Broadcasting Corporation. Once his reputation as a
poet and translator began to build, Merwin returned
to the United States, first living in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (where he became acquainted with
such giants of American poetry as Sylvia Plath,
Adrianne Rich, Donald Hall, and Robert Lowell),
and then in New York City. For a while in the
1960s, he lived in the rural area near Lyon in the
south of France, which he was later to write about
in the memoir The Lost Upland and the poetry collection The Vixen. In the 1970s, Merwin moved to
Hawaii. The concern for nature and the ecology that
shows throughout his poetry is reflected in his life
in Haiku, Hawaii, where he lives on a former
pineapple plantation that he has worked to restore
to its original rainforest condition.
Merwin has been an influential force in American poetry since the publication of his first collection, A Mask for Janus, in 1954. A Mask for
Janus was selected by W. H. Auden to be part of
the Yale Series of Young Poets. (Merwin himself
is the judge for this award today.) Since then, he
has gone on to publish many collections, including
1988’s The Rain In the Trees, in which “Horizons
of Rooms” was published. Other honors that he has
received include fellowships from the Rockefeller
Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters; fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Poets; and almost all major awards available to poets, including the Bollingen Prize for Po-
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W. S. Merwin
etry, the Tanning Prize, the Lila Wallace/Reader’s
Digest Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. In
1999–2000, he served as a special consultant to the
poet laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky.
He has published dozens of books of poetry, as well
as numerous works of translations and histories of
places where he has lived, including Pennsylvania,
France, and Hawaii. His poetic style has evolved
from strict formal poetry that he wrote fresh out of
college to the current work, which uses little traditional structure and concentrates on his growing
sense of history and a spiritual connection to the
land. His most recent collection of poetry is The
River Sounds published in 1999.
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T h e
H o r i z o n s
o f
R o o m s
“rooms” to the varieties of caves, tents, huts, or
anything else that could be called a room throughout the span of time.
The second line hints at the reason why humans never really consider the rooms in which they
live. Living in rooms is so thoroughly familiar that
it is taken for granted. The only times that people
become aware of being confined to indoor living
are when they are unable to go outside, such as
when it is raining or snowing. The line break from
lines 3 to 4 is a run-on line, meaning that it carries
the thought over with just the slight pause required
by returning to the poem’s left-hand margin but
without any punctuation. Here, the run-on line is
used to make readers think two different ideas
about one phrase. In one sense, “or very late” can
be read as the third example of a situation that
would make people stay in their rooms, similar to
the rain and snow already mentioned. Whereas rain
and snow present natural dangers, this phrase introduces the ways society makes it dangerous to
leave rooms, implying that there is a time, beyond
late night that is “too” late, when criminals lurk.
Reading beyond the line break, however, creates
the phrase “very late with everyone else in another
room.” This line conjures an image of some lonesome person sitting in the darkness, contemplating
familiar objects, such as the walls of a room, isolated from the people that they live with. The first
sense of “very late” presents a world outside that
is dangerous and confining; the second describes a
person suffering from a social separation that is personal and psychological.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–6
The main ideas of “The Horizons of Rooms”
are introduced in the poem’s first line, with a sharp
directness that serves to catch readers off guard.
The poem uses the familiar, comfortable word
“room,” but it quickly makes clear that it means
more by this word than the way that it is commonly used. Readers can tell that they need to
think in broader terms when the poem tells them
that rooms have existed “for such a short time”:
“Such” usually limits “a short time” to seconds or
minutes, but such an idea conflicts with any possible definition of “rooms.” Rooms have been
around for a long time, and calling their existence
short draws a comparison to the time before
recorded history when humans did not live indoors
at all. This idea sets the poem in historical terms
of centuries and eons, broadening the idea of
8 0
Lines 5 and 6 return to the main theme, which
was merely implied in the first two lines, making
those points more directly. The phrase “time beyond measure” clarifies what the poem meant earlier when it said that rooms have existed for “such
a short time,” and the phrase “many have forgotten the sky” restates the idea that, regarding rooms,
“we can think of nothing else.”
Lines 7–10
The geological sense that the poem has applied
to the word “room” is raised again in line 7, which
describes the first room as a cave, presumably during the Ice Age. Here, the poem shows a distinction between what it means by the word “room”
and shelters that occur in nature. The cave described in line 7 is just a place with stone and ice,
but the addition of a fallen tree in line 8 implies
that humans added to what was already there, dragging the tree from where it fell to block the mouth
of the cave, making the room complete.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
T h e
In line 9, the poem balances its images drawn
from nature with a reminder of the human presence
in the room, representing human life with one of
its most common bodily functions, the beating of
a heart. The close relationship between nature and
humans is implied symbolically in line 10, with the
heartbeat of a human echoing off the wall of ice,
showing that each is as responsible as the other for
the sound that enlivens the room. Merwin uses
irony here by linking the life-sustaining heartbeat
to ice, which is usually associated with coldness,
immobility, and death.
Lines 11–16
Continuing with its historical perspective, the
poem focuses on the how the shelter of rooms enabled humanity to survive. Line 11 explains that
people could give birth safely once they were able
to do so inside. In line 12, though, the poem reverses this view of the room providing security and,
instead, makes it seem somehow threatening by repeating the word “room.” The unnecessary addition
of the phrase “in a room” so soon after the last use
of the word indicates how the idea of the room insinuated itself into human consciousness, becoming
present in all aspects of life for people millions of
years ago. In lines 13 and 14, the poem asserts that
humans came to see everything as a room, even the
landscape. This is a reversal of the normal understanding of these ideas, because landscapes are generally thought of as being, by definition, open and
natural, whereas rooms are closed and indoors.
Merwin explains how the landscape is seen as a
room in lines 15 and 16, changing the concept of a
room’s enclosure from the physical space that it generally connotes to a segment of time. In human
minds, the mountains mentioned in line 15 are
squeezed between ideas of rooms, confined between
one memory of a room and another because the minds
of humans are so filled with thoughts of rooms.
Lines 17–18
In the poem’s most psychologically complex
stanza, Merwin combines memory, identity, and
metaphysics. In contrast to the previous stanzas,
which discussed the development of ideas from
their earliest forms, this stanza uses the present
tense voice to describe human thought today. More
and more people remember childhood as being a
room, the poem says. Rather than just restating the
idea that people see things in terms of the rooms
that they live in, though, the poem adds a twist in
line 18. The idea of childhood as a room is one that
these people have after they have grown up, and
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Media
Adaptations
• A 1991 videocassette of Merwin reading from
the book this poem came from, entitled W. S.
Merwin: The Rain in the Trees, is available from
Atlas Video. It is part of the series A Moveable
Feast: Profiles of Contemporary Authors.
• Merwin reads from his Selected Poems and The
Rain in the Trees on a videocassette from the
Lannan Foundation, taped in Los Angeles on
May 16, 1988, and released in 1989.
• Films for the Humanities and Sciences has released a 1997 videocassette of Merwin talking
about his life and poetry and reading from his
works, under the title Witness the Ecological Poetry of W. S. Merwin.
• Roland Flint interviewed Merwin on October
10, 1994, just after he won the prestigious Tanning Prize. That interview, along with Merwin
reading some poems from The Rain in the Trees,
is on a videocassette titled The Writing Life, released by The Society, of Columbia, Maryland,
in 1994.
• Merwin reads his poetry on a 1991 audiocassette from In Our Times Arts Media entitled Selected Poems and The Rain in the Trees.
within that idea they have another, the idea of sitting in that room and thinking of a forest. The poem
does not imply that these people could ever have
gone to the forest, or even that they may have seen
the forest from their childhood rooms, but only that
the forest existed within their memories of when
they were young.
Lines 19–22
These two stanzas continue with the memory
begun in the stanza that preceded them. They describe the world from a baby’s perspective, with
“the first hands and the first voices” representing
the child’s initial contact with other humans, mentioning the ceiling that the baby, lying on his or her
back, would see beyond the people who hover over
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its head. The use of the word “emerge” gives this
memory a particularly vague quality, like the forest that the person is said to remember thinking
about in line 18: the memories show up from
nowhere in particular and can disappear just as suddenly. Lines 20 and 21 describe a grown person,
later in life, lying back and staring at the ceiling,
much in the same way that the baby did, but in different circumstances. In the same way that the
poem travels back to a time when the human race
first started to use rooms, these lines travel back to
one person’s awareness of ceilings.
Lines 23–24
Lines 23 and 24 serve to remind readers that
this person’s experience of the ceiling is the same
as the one that the first person in a room, giving
birth in a cave millions of years ago, went through.
Lines 25–28
Line 25 serves to remind readers of how infrequent the practice of sleeping outdoors has become.
This might seem an obvious and inconsequential fact,
but it fits with the historical perspective that the poem
has provided up to this point. Though rooms are millions of years old, people still frequently slept outside, at least on special occasions, such as vacations,
or during hot weather, until fairly recently. The number of people sleeping outside has dwindled “by now”
to a small minority. The second function of line 25
is to remind readers, through the mention of sleep,
of the “unconsciousness” motif that was first introduced in line 17 as a hazy memory. Line 26 shows
a social conscience by remembering the homeless,
who live on the streets and sleep in doorways.
Whereas most of this poem views society’s debt to
rooms as a mixed blessing at best, this line shows the
homeless aspiring to be room dwellers, sleeping next
to rooms that they are not allowed to enter.
Lines 27 and 28 describe the spread of civilization, which is represented by rooms and the
products that are manufactured indoors, into areas
that have not previously been civilized. The uncivilized areas are identified as being remote and
hard to access or else inhabited by poor people who
do not own any methods of transportation so that
they have to transport the manufactured items by
foot. This line refers to “the final uplands,” which
is echoed later in Merwin’s career in the title of his
1992 book about the ancient farming communities
around the Dorgdone River in France, The Lost Upland. The word “uplands” is mostly used in rural
societies to describe either land that is at a higher
elevation (which would echo the mention of moun-
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tains in line 15) or to describe land that is inland,
away from oceans, and thus more difficult for
colonists to reach with their man-made products.
Lines 29–34
The last three stanzas of the poem can be seen
as a summary of the ideas that have been presented
before. Lines 29 and 30 repeat the idea of a room
being a starting place, which is expressed earlier in
the poem with the image of a child being born in
a cave during the Ice Age. The “we” in this line
might be a contemporary gathering that actually
would convene in a “meeting room,” but it also
could serve as a statement on civilized society. The
fact that, as line 30 puts it, we “go on from room
to room,” is a restatement of the earlier idea that
any one human is accustomed to having one ceiling after another over her or his head from birth.
Lines 31 and 32 repeat the idea of memory that
was raised in line 17, implying that humans have
some innate knowledge of what life was millions
of years ago, before there were rooms. As it is
stated here, the idea makes sense: These lines do
not pretend to tell readers what they might remember about the time before rooms but only state
the probable fact that a person entering a room
might, on some unconscious level, register some
curiosity about what existed on that land long before it was cultivated for human use.
The poem’s final two lines raise a tone that is
at odds with everything else it says. There is nothing in the previous thirty-two lines that would lead
readers to believe that “living in the room” can be
construed as “good fortune.” On the contrary, most
of the poem indicated that rooms are a curse, if only
because they isolate humanity from the real world.
If the poem’s last line is to be accepted as being sincere, then the good fortune of living in the room can
only be meant in contrast to the worse fate of what
life would be without the shelter that human beings
need. This sense of “good fortune” is foreshadowed
earlier by the assertion in lines 11 and 12 that giving birth in a room allowed for a successful childbirth and, in line 26, by mention of the hopeful who
would like so much to be in a room that they will
sleep as close to it as they can get, on doorsteps.
Themes
Man versus Nature
“The Horizons of Rooms” makes a clear distinction between humanity and nature, showing
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how the two initially worked in cooperation but
drifted apart over the centuries. In this poem, a
room means any indoor space that is made by human control. It does not have to be entirely manufactured but can show as little human interference
as moving a fallen tree to block the opening of a
natural cave foundation.
According to the history that Merwin presents
here, the early relationship between humans and
nature was a mutually beneficial one. Nature provided shelter, as the poem describes in the sixth
stanza, where the poem credits the cave with causing a child’s birth. The human in the cave gives nature life, with heartbeats echoing off the cave’s ice.
In the beginning, at least, when humans were
thought to be less mentally complex, there was a
close bond between nature and man.
This relationship is shown to have evolved,
however, as humans began taking control of their
environment and creating rooms where they could
live comfortably. Eventually, nature has become
little more than a dim memory, and humans can see
nothing surrounding themselves except rooms.
They even see the widest open areas in terms of
the rooms that they have seen last or are going to
see next.
The end of the poem is ambiguous about the
current relationship between humanity and nature.
Taken literally, it says that humans are fortunate to
be sheltered from nature. The poem does indicate,
in several places, the dangers of nature, but for the
most part it views humanity’s isolation from nature
with regret. The “good fortune” referred to in the
last stanza can only be good when compared with
an implied worse fate that would befall humans if
they were not living indoors.
Security
The poem implies that the reason humanity has
taken to living in rooms is for security, for shelter
from the elements of raw nature. It is very clear
about the fact that, millions of years ago, the birth
it describes would not have been completed successfully if it had not occurred in a room. This single instance can easily be expanded to stand for all
births and the vulnerability of humans when they
are born. In the present day, as the poem points out
in the first and second stanzas, people use rooms to
protect themselves from rain and snow. The sense
of security humanity derives from rooms is made
most obvious in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
lines, which mention people sleeping “on doorsteps
leading to rooms,” implying their desperation to be
inside. The security that rooms offer is not without
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Research what anthropologists have been able
to determine about humanity’s earliest housing.
In particular, show the differences between the
first free-standing structures made by human beings and the earliest “rooms,” the caves in which
people lived.
• This poem suggests that people have memories
of what life was like before the human species
started living indoors. Read about psychologist
C. G. Jung’s theory of the “collective unconscious,” which assumes that some of mankind’s
earliest experiences are still carried in the memories of all people. Show how Jung would agree
and disagree with Merwin.
• With a pencil, pen, or computer program, design a room you would like to have in your
house that you think W. S. Merwin would approve of. Use examples from this poem to show
why your design would be acceptable.
• This poem mentions the idea of sounds echoing
off ice several times. Research the acoustic
properties of ice and report on how sounds
bouncing off it would be different from those
bouncing off stone, snow, or wood.
• Talk to an architect or a carpenter about how
personal computers have changed the design of
rooms in American homes being built in the last
ten years. Try to imagine how other major innovations, such as electric lighting, changed the
shapes of homes in the past.
• Some people think that babies born at home
have an advantage over those born in a hospital, whereas others think that it does not matter
because the baby is too young to register her or
his surrounding. Read an article from each perspective. Refer to both articles in explaining
whether or not you think that the room that one
is born in matters.
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its drawbacks, though, because it makes people
think in terms of man-made ceilings instead of the
natural sky that their ancestors looked up at. This,
however, is given as a fact of modern life that may
be regretted but cannot be ignored.
Nostalgia
The word “nostalgia” is often used casually to
refer to fond memories of something that one has
experienced. It does not draw off one’s personal experience, though: People can have a nostalgic longing for some bygone era that happened before they
were born. This kind of vague longing is described
in “The Horizons of Rooms,” which describes a
feeling that all humans have for things that they
know their ancestors experienced millions of years
ago. In line 11, Merwin presents one particular
scene from millions of years ago, the birth of a child,
and then he echoes that experience in a modern situation, with a newborn looking up at the hands and
voices and a ceiling beyond them. The connection
is made even more explicit when the poem gives
the modern room a facet that the prehistoric room
had, a wall of ice that sound bounces off.
An idea of this sort, which is familiar to people across different ages and in different countries,
is called an “archetype.” The word came to literary criticism from psychology, particularly from
the work of Carl Jung, who theorized that the experiences of ancestors would still resonate in their
descendents in hidden memories, or a “collective
unconscious.” In this poem, Merwin presents modern humans as being familiar with the experiences
of the past and as longing for things that members
of the race experienced, even if they did not have
those experiences themselves.
The poem’s nostalgic element can be seen in
the way that modern humans feel about their memories, viewing them with sadness and longing. In
the eighth stanza, there is an aura of regret about
the way humans are so far removed from nature
that they do not even have memories about forests
but only remember having ideas about forests. The
poem focuses readers’ attention on things that are
gone or are soon to go: “[M]any have forgotten the
sky,” it explains, and “most sleeping is done in
rooms.” Near the end, the poem explicitly states
why humans are nostalgic for the way the world
once was, when it says that, wherever there is a
room, “we know there was something before.”
Alienation
The problem with rooms, as this poem presents
it, is that they alienate humanity from the real
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world. In the very first stanza, it makes rooms seem
minor and inconsequential in the larger scope of
time, but it also shows humans to be mistaken about
their importance because “we think there is nothing else.” Much of the subsequent poem serves to
remind readers of the richness of nature that exists
outside of rooms: rain, snow, trees, sky, mountains,
and even the remote upland areas that have not yet
been civilized. Whereas rooms originally coexisted
with nature, as in the example of the ancient room
made of stone, ice, and a fallen tree, people currently use the concept of rooms to separate themselves from nature. They stay inside, alienated. As
the fifteenth stanza puts it, “we meet in a room /
and go on from room to room.” The vastness of nature has been scaled down, so that even the mountains, the landscape, and the horizon are thought of
in terms of rooms and are not experienced in their
own right anymore.
Style
Style
This poem is written in free verse, which is a
way of saying that it does not follow any regular
pattern of rhythm or rhyme. The lines do not follow any standard length either. This can be seen
with a cursory glance at the poem, which sometimes has a long line followed by a short line,
sometimes a short line followed by a long one, and
sometimes pairs of lines of nearly equal length. Although the stanzas are two lines each, it cannot
properly be said that this poem is written in couplets, because that term is usually used for lines
that are similar in rhythm and length and that
rhyme with each other.
The voice of the poem is usually omniscient,
which means that it can give information from anywhere at any time. It is cold and logical, such as
when it explains that “many have forgotten” or observes that “there are more every year who remember.” At the end of the poem, the voice uses
the first person plural form of address, including itself with those being described, referring to humanity collectively as “we.”
Merwin often uses the poetic technique known
as the synecdoche to make his ideas more forceful.
Synecdoche is the use of one particular member of
a group or one particular part of a thing to represent the whole. For instance, when he refers to “a
heart beating,” it is clear that he means a whole
person, but by focusing on this one specific part he
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is able to use the emotional associations that come
with a beating heart without wasting extra words
to mention the person attached. He does a similar
thing by referring to “the first hands and first
voices” in line 17. Here, the synecdoche not only
implies the whole persons, without taking the trouble to state the obvious, but it also gives an infant’s
eye view of the world, specifying the things that a
child in a crib would notice. In a sense, “rooms,”
the main image of the poem, is a synecdoche because it is just one symptom of humanity’s narrowed and sheltered existence that is used to represent an entire problem.
Tone
Merwin achieves an ironic tone in this poem,
not by making any claims that are too outlandish,
but by the use of repetition. In nine of the stanzas—
just over half of them—the words “room” or
“rooms” are at the end of the first line. In addition,
they end the second line in four stanzas. The hollow sound of this word, which is repeated so often, gives the poem a hollow, haunting sound. The
fact that the poem uses this word so often creates
a somewhat mocking tone, as if the speaker of the
poem does not believe that rooms are as important
as they are generally believed to be. For example,
the lines “because of a room a heart was born / in
a room” could easily have been handled grammatically without the second use of the word “room,”
but using it twice overemphasizes it, making readers resistant to the concept of rooms.
Near the end of the poem, in the three stanzas
that lead to the final one, a repetitious pattern occurs to take the speaker’s exhaustive use of the
word “room” to an extreme. Stanzas 14, 15, and 16
start with lines that parallel each other in structure
and in sound: “[A]nd the products of rooms,” “we
meet in a room,” and “once there is a room” all
come in such close succession that it is difficult to
avoid the tone that they set. They are plain statements, and, clustered together like this, monotonous ones, and in that way their tone fits the lackluster quality that the poem is attributing to rooms
themselves.
Historical Context
Throughout history, there have always been people
who were forced to live out of doors, with no permanent address and no means to afford any type of
“room.” In the 1980s, though, the issue of home-
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lessness became a significant social issue. The
country’s homeless population soared during that
time. It is difficult to know just how many people
were homeless at this time, because, by definition,
homeless people have no addresses where they can
be contacted and therefore counted. Some sources
estimated that two or three million Americans were
without housing at the height of the problem, although more recent calculations say that the number was closer to 600–700,000. The wide variance
in numbers is due to the fact that different organizations have used different methods to determine
the number of homeless people. Counting the
homeless has always been done by mathematical
formulae that try to expand on what little information is available, with varying degrees of accuracy.
Several factors are seen to have caused the
homeless crisis of the 1980s. One of the most direct causes was the recession at the end of the
1970s, which resulted in the highest rate of poverty
in two decades. By 1982, unemployment in America was at 10.8 percent, its highest rate since the
Great Depression. The recession reached across the
globe, where some countries suffered triple-digit
inflation. This made it cheap for American manufacturers to move their production facilities to
Third World countries, taking away hundreds of
thousands of manufacturing jobs that had provided
the promise of secure, lifetime employment to earlier generations. The semi-skilled took jobs from
the unskilled, pushing them deeper into poverty just
as prices were rising.
At the same time, the cost of housing was rising faster than other necessary budget items, especially for those at the lowest economic levels. A
shift in population movement had affluent Americans moving into cities, reversing a trend that had
existed since the end of World War II of cities losing population to suburbs. Developers bought inexpensive apartment buildings and tore them down
and rebuilt on the land or else renovated them to
high-priced condominiums, driving away tenants
who could afford rent but had no down payment
for a mortgage. To attract higher-class residents,
cities bulldozed the Single Room Occupancy hotels (SROs), which had provided inexpensive, subsidized shelter. Falling crop prices created intense
economic difficulties in rural areas, and many farmers, unable to meet mortgage payments, underwent
bank foreclosure and were left with no livelihood
and no place to live.
One significant segment of the homeless population was those who suffered from mental health
disorders that kept them from work. During the
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1980s: The price of housing is on the rise. Investment firms find real estate a lucrative place
to make money, as Americans spend proportionally more for shelter than for any of their
other requirements.
Today: New construction is stable, thanks to
low interest rates, and the profits to be made are
comparable to other investments.
• 1980s: Third World nations, like the “final uplands” mentioned in the poem, weaken their
shaky economies by importing more than their
gross domestic products can pay for. More than
twenty countries are forced to default on international loans.
Today: The world economy is on the decline
but is still enjoying a record-setting long period
of prosperity.
started having their babies at home, with the aid
of midwives.
Today: Holistic medicine and herbal supplements have become accepted mainstream products, but Americans still have little faith in midwives’ ability to handle birth complications, and
women overwhelmingly have their babies in
hospitals, or with a midwife and a doctor’s supervision.
• 1980s: The term “global warming” first comes
into common usage when NASA scientists report to Congress that the probable cause for the
rising temperature is the greenhouse effect, with
carbon dioxide and other gasses trapping the
sun’s rays within the atmosphere.
Today: Although it is still refuted by some, the
danger of global warming is recognized by most
credible scientific institutions.
1960s and 1970s, new theories of patients’ rights
led to tougher standards against holding people
against their will. Those who were deemed not dangerous to themselves were deinstitutionalized and
sent out into the world to fend for themselves.
Many were unable to cope, even with economic assistance, and ended up living on the streets.
In earlier times of economic difficulty during
the twentieth century, the U. S. government had enacted policies to help the underprivileged. During
the depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt backed the New Deal, an assemblage of
economic bills that, among other things, provided
government loans to farmers and homeowners and
created government jobs to keep people working.
During the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson
pressed for a program called the Great Society, with
the stated goal of eliminating poverty in America.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, though,
it was with a campaign based on reducing the size
of the federal government, not expanding it. That
year, Reagan signed the deepest tax cut in Ameri-
can history, following an economic theory that held
that the economy would prosper with less government involvement and that this prosperous society
would willingly take care of the needy within it.
His theory was called “trickle-down economics”
because it counted on prosperity to eventually reach
those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Before
that could happen, though, there had to be painful
cuts in government services that some saw as aggravating the homeless problem. Government programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent
Children and the Department of Housing and Urban Development saw their budgets slashed by
more than half, just as the problem of homelessness was growing. It did not help that Reagan was
reluctant to discuss homelessness or that when he
did, he characterized it as a lifestyle decision that
had been made by the homeless people.
As the problem grew, it became one of the political issues that defined the decade. Political activists organized massive protests and activities to
draw the public’s attention to the problem and to
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• 1980s: In a development related to the rise of
holistic medicine in the 1970s, more Americans
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the government’s lack of response to it. In many
urban areas, people donated their time and money
to building and maintaining shelters. One of the
most famous advocates of the rights of the homeless was Mitch Snyder, a former advertising executive who drew national attention to the problem
with a 1994 hunger strike and who led 250,000 people in a march for affordable housing in Washington in 1989. In 1986, six million people participated in Hands Across America, a televised event
that aimed to form a chain of people holding hands
that would stretch from coast to coast to bring public attention to homelessness. These high-profile efforts brought little governmental assistance. Perhaps the greatest success was the 1987 Homeless
Assistance Act, intended to provide job training,
emergency shelter funds, and the Interagency
Council on the Homeless to coordinate federal efforts; of one billion dollars budgeted for the act,
Congress only provided $600 million. America’s
economic prosperity since the early 1990s has
given the government revenues to address the
homeless problem, making it less conspicuous, but
at the time that Merwin wrote this poem, the question of who could afford the privilege of living indoors was still a compelling social issue.
Critical Overview
Merwin’s poetry has been almost universally praised
by critics since the start of his career, with the publication of his first book in 1952, A Mask for Janus.
Then, he was recognized as a master of the traditional forms, showing the influence of the poet
Robert Graves (whom he worked for, tutoring
Graves’s children) and of the medieval poetry that
he was translating for a living. It has always been
considered one of Merwin’s graces not to stay confined to any particular style, however. As Edward J.
Brunner put it in 1991, he “appears to have no style
at all, or to take on whatever style suites the moment.” For Brunner, this “transparency” is what
makes Merwin’s poetry effective, although he does
think that changing so often made the poet “underestimated by reviewers: they have perennially lagged
one book behind him, expecting the latest volume
to continue the tendencies of the one before.”
Although Merwin’s growth may have baffled
reviewers, it has generally been met with critical
approval. In the 1960s, he made his most dramatic
change, expanding beyond formal poetry and striking out with the free verse style that he has used
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ever since. Critics kept pace with his stylistic
changes, and reviews still stayed on his side, even
as his writing took on a more personal form than
they had known. Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize in
1970 for The Carrier of Ladders.
It would be a mistake, however, to call the freedom he has exercised in his poetry of the last several decades a signature style, for within the wide
open terrain of free verse Merwin has exhibited
many different styles, using a new one for each new
volume of poetry he has produced. When The Rain
In the Trees was published, critics accepted the fact
that he was a poet always reinventing himself and
that most of his new styles were successful. He was
not as directly influential with that book as he had
been in 1967, when his book The Lice spurred a
wave of younger poets to directly imitate his style,
but instead his influence was felt on the range of
styles practiced by a newer generation of poets. As
Mark Jarman said in the Hudson Review:
[T]he current factions of poetry are reflected in the
range of his accomplishments. For the new formalist, the neo-narrative poet, the language poet, the
writer of free verse lyric, for each of these there is a
Merwin and it would be good to come to terms with
him.
Now, at age 73, Merwin’s reputation is beyond
reproach. In a recent overview of the poet’s life in
the Los Angeles Times, Tony Perry captured the esteem fellow poets hold for Merwin this way: “In
fact, he’s important enough that there is a joke in
literary circles that if Merwin has not won a particular prize, it obviously is not worth winning.”
His poems are still frequently published, especially
in the Atlantic Monthly, which has had a longstanding relationship with him for the past twentyfive years, and the New Yorker, one of the most
respected publications in the country to print the
works of poets.
Criticism
David Kelly
Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College
and an associate professor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and has
written extensively for academic publishers. In this
essay, Kelly examines how the concept of an echo
is more than just a symbol in Merwin’s poem, affecting readers’ entire perception of the poem’s
message.
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Somewhere between
these two, the solid and the
mobile, the echoer and the
echoed, lies the secret to the
ancient mystery of rooms.”
Science is the pursuit of rational explanations,
but sometimes scientific rationality does not come
close enough to human experience to ring true. A
good example of this is the case of echoes. Echoes
can be scientifically measured and explained, but
even the most complete theory does little to ease
the strange feeling of hearing something once and
then hearing it again, seconds later, from a different direction. A poet writing about echoes does not
have to deal with what causes them but with that
they feel like and with the other places in life where
that feeling turns up.
W. S. Merwin’s poem “The Horizons of
Rooms” is not a poem about echoes, but it uses the
idea of them to make its point clear. The poem’s
main focus is, of course, rooms, specifically how
rooms keep humanity separated from nature. To
study this point seriously means showing how
rooms echo the natural world. “The Horizons of
Rooms” tells its readers that people can see their
existence only in terms of rooms and that they
yearn for the natural world, but the relationship between these two is left unexplained. The relationship occurs, like a natural phenomenon, for readers to encounter and reach their own conclusions.
The poem itself, though, is not a thing of nature. It
is seeded with hints, like its emphasis on echoes,
which help readers understand its position.
For the most part, Merwin avoids using specific poetic techniques. The point of “The Horizons
of Rooms” is to look at nature, to examine the problem of humanity forcing its will on natural patterns.
For the poet to impose a strict pattern on his words
would be a direct violation of what the words are
trying to express. The closest thing to formal style
is the fact that all of the poem’s stanzas have the
same number of lines, two each. Superficially, they
bear a slight resemblance to couplets, an ancient
technique derived from the oral tradition that preceded written poetry. Couplets, however, have
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more to bind the two sequential lines together than
mere proximity. The traditional couplet has two
lines of the same length, with the same number of
syllables following the same rhythm pattern (for
example, “Whose woods are these? I think I know
/ His house is in the village, though”). Most often,
the two lines end with rhyming words, which is in
itself a device of echoing one sound with another.
If “The Horizons of Rooms” is trying to make a
subtle point about echoes resonating throughout human history, rhyming every two lines would probably overemphasize that point to death.
There cannot be a strict formal structure, not
if the poem intends to explore truths beyond conventional thought, cutting through the misconceptions that human minds have developed and accepted as reality. Strict adherence to form would
be just as confining as limiting life itself to rooms.
Letting each stanza find its own rhythm mirrors the
poem’s spirit of intellectual freedom, whereas
maintaining the consistency of two-line stanzas at
least gives readers some feel for the balance and
harmony found in nature.
The poem has no structural elements other than
the consistency of two lines per stanza. It would be
over-ambitious for a critic to make too much of
this, to say that the pairings of these lines is meant
to represent a duality of nature, such as sound and
echo. Poets usually fail when they use elements of
poetry as if they are sending coded messages. It is
not, however, too exaggerated to look at how these
pairs of lines neatly hold pairs of ideas together: In
this case, the “two-ness” of the lines is not the message; it just happens to give a visual effect to the
poem’s balance of images. Each stanza sets the
poem’s main idea, that of “rooms,” against one
other idea of equal force that helps compliment or
contrast it, so that, as each stanza passes, readers
get a clearer sense of the meaning of rooms within
this poem.
Together, the words “room” and “rooms” appear twenty-one times within the thirty-four lines
of the poem, showing up at least once in each stanza
and twice in two of them. One frantic stanza near
the end uses “room” three times, a quarter of its total word count. The use of short two-line stanzas
allows this word to be counterbalanced with other
ideas that are of equal importance in the short term.
For example, in the first stanza, the word “rain” is
the only other significant noun. In the second, it is
“snow”; in the third, “sky.” Subsequent stanzas pair
“room” with ideas that would not be as noticeable
in a poem rich in description or in one with a heavy
poetic style to distract its readers’ attention. Other
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pairings include “room / tree,” “mountain / room,”
“room / wall of ice,” and “room / ceiling.” The pattern that emerges is that there are other things that
are as important as the concept of rooms, but, as the
poem’s second line explains, people have been
trained to see these other things only as they relate
to rooms. The overall movement of the poem is to
move these paired words away from the familiar, so
that the final stanzas introduce “the final uplands,”
“something,” and “good fortune,” abstract concepts
that remind readers of how little they know.
The effect of balancing images like the sky and
mountains against a hollow, vague, open concept
like “room” is close to the effect that an echo has
when it takes a real-life sound and copies it with a
haunting imitation. The echo is, in fact, the most
important image in this poem. One clue of this
comes from simple arithmetic: In a poem that
makes such infrequent reference to tangible objects, the echoing wall of ice shows up twice. It is
a powerful image, rich with associations and imagination. When it is first mentioned, the wall of ice
echoes a heartbeat, small and gentle, that would
barely be audible under usual circumstance but is
raised to a significant echo through poetic exaggeration. This is the time when the echoing wall is
in a cave that has given an early human sanctity,
signifying the origin of the “room” concept. The
second time the echo is mentioned, it appears in a
modern context, actually echoing its earlier appearance in the poem. Here, in the twelfth stanza,
the poem gives emphasis to the wall of ice by splitting its description at the line break, leaving “of
ice” to stand adrift on its own, conspicuously. Doing so highlights the difference between nature’s
cold, hard immobility and the “hands and voices”
that create the sounds that echo off it. Somewhere
between these two, the solid and the mobile, the
echoer and the echoed, lies the secret to the ancient
mystery of rooms.
The constant repetition of the hollow “oo”
sound in “room” brings up the feeling of an echo.
The powerful and complex image presented by the
noises of life bouncing off walls of ice certainly
raises the idea of an echo. In addition to these is
Merwin’s free-form play with the concept of time,
which he has bouncing around like sound waves
off the walls, from ancient to modern, from earlier
to right now. Time is a concept that is always tied
to echoes, since the present is always an echo of
the past.
The linear sense of time that readers take for
granted is fractured, bent, and examined from dif-
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• To help readers become familiar with Merwin’s
earlier career, Copper Canyon Press published
a thrift edition entitled The First Four Books of
Poems, which contains “A Mask for Janus,”
“The Dancing Bears,” “Green with Beasts,” and
“The Drunk in the Furnace.” The same press has
also published The Second Four Books of
Poems, which includes “The Moving Target,”
“The Life,” “The Carrier of Ladders,” and
“Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment.”
• One of the strongest influences on Merwin was
John Berryman, with whom he studied at Princeton. Berryman’s 1964 collection 77 Dream Songs,
for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, is considered
one of the great books of twentieth-century
poetry. It is available as The Dream Songs, published by Noonday Press and released in 1982.
• Maurice Manning is the most recent winner of
the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, for
which Merwin is the judge. His collection of
poems, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was
published by Yale University Press in 2001.
• Even readers who are not familiar with the Purgatorio of fourteenth-century poet Dante
Alighieri will be able to identify some of Merwin’s verbal touches in his 2000 translation from
the Italian, available from Knopf. It is the most
recent of the great works of literature that Merwin has translated, and one of his most acclaimed.
• Another poet who dealt with humanity’s complex relationship with nature was Theodore
Roethke, who was from the generation before
Merwin’s. Roethke’s best work is now available
in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke,
published by Anchor Press in 1975.
• Gary Snyder is a poet who is often associated
with Merwin—they are from the same generation and studied under the same Zen master. Students who appreciate Merwin’s poetry often appreciate Snyder’s. His poetry is collected in No
Nature: New and Selected Poems, published by
Pantheon Books in 1993.
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ferent angles, with the net effect of making readers start all over with their expectations. Starting in
the first stanza, the poem twists the idea of time
around from ordinary expectations. Under normal
circumstances, the idea of the room would be considered an ancient one, a standard of civilization
that has been with humanity throughout history and
is therefore, unquestionably, quite old. This poem
takes an even wider look at history, however, reminding readers of the fact that humans and their
history are actually quite new, measured in tens of
thousands of years as opposed to about twenty billion years or so since the big bang.
Other instances of time in this poem serve to
continually rearrange readers’ expectations. They
range from the localized situations that could take
place within a contemporary lifetime, such as sitting up late or meeting other people, to the prehistoric scene of the first person to inhabit a room and
the isolation that resulted. Because the poem’s
sense of time is dealt with unevenly, with past and
present woven together without a straight chronological ordering, it is able to examine what humanity is and, simultaneously, how it came to be
that way. The present may be an echo of the past,
but, according to the way the poem has used the
word “echo” and presented the idea of it, the meaning of this relationship is much more complex than
just noting that one thing follows the other.
There are two significant cases that present this
poem’s sense of time. One has to do with the image of the echoing well of ice, and it takes place
across stanzas 10 through 12. Stanza 10 begins a
line of thought that does not follow logically from
the one that came before it, breaking away from
the previous idea with the word “but,” a weak way
to obscure the change in direction. This stanza tells
of a situation from the childhood of a typical person, experiencing the world from a crib or bassinet,
looking up at hands, voices, and a ceiling; stanza
11 tells of a situation later in life; stanza 12 takes
the same life and ties it to the primitive life from
centuries past by calling the wall of the contemporary room a “wall of ice.” The forward progress of
one person’s story is quickly transferred to the story
of the species, bound together by the presence of
the echo.
The other significant trick of time in this poem
is verbal. In line 18, discussing people who think
of a room when they think of childhood, Merwin
explains the room that comes to mind is one “in
which the person they were is thinking of a forest.”
There is seldom a case in which “were” and “is”
belong together, and it takes a skillful poet to con-
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struct a phrase in which they can exist comfortably
side by side. The conflict of putting past and present together like this, almost making them one, is
what the poem is all about. It is also the basic principle of the echo, when what happened a few moments ago is happening now.
The one place where “The Horizons of
Rooms” does not imply an echo is its title. No echo
comes from the horizon, which is too flat and distant to bounce sound back. This is the poem’s deepest contradiction: The horizon is everything that a
room is not, and vice versa. This may be Merwin’s
ultimate point, that rooms lack the freedom that a
true horizon holds forth. It isn’t just a freedom from
walls that rooms prohibit, but freedom from the
echoes of the near and distant past.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “The Horizons of
Rooms,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Wendy Perkins
Perkins teaches American and British literature and film. In this essay, Perkins explores the
poem’s statement on the modern separation between nature and humanity.
In his article on W. S. Merwin for the Yale Review, Laurence Lieberman writes that Merwin’s
poetry often “pronounces a judgment against modern men,” in that they have “betrayed [that which]
had power to save us.” One such redemptive force
that Merwin identifies in his poetry is nature,
which, Lieberman notes, the poet insists can save
us from “a moral vacuity that is absolute and irrevocable.” In many of his poems, Merwin condemns the modern impulse to ignore and separate
ourselves from nature. In “Horizons of Rooms,” he
illustrates this theme in an exploration of our alienation from the natural world and the sense of nothingness that results.
In his review of Merwin’s The Rain in the
Trees, Mark Jarman determines that the “presiding
metaphor” of the poems in that volume “is that of
a lost language.” In “Horizons of Rooms,” a sense
of language lost is evident throughout the poem in
its spare verse, devoid of interior and exterior details. This sparsity suggests that the consequence
of one’s alienation from nature is a universe
stripped of color and meaning.
The poem reinforces its sense of alienation as
it engrosses one in the thresholds between past and
present. Merwin moves readers back and forth
through time, from a period when humans enjoyed
a communion with nature to the modern age, when
people have placed themselves in rooms that sep-
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arate them from the natural world, a world that people have now come to ignore. The title suggests
that the spaces in which people presently exist have
become their entire world; the boundaries of these
rooms combine into an artificial horizon that people cannot see beyond.
The speaker notes that even though “there have
been rooms for such a short time,” people are no
longer aware of what exists in the physical world
outside the room, “unless it is raining or snowing.”
Nature no longer has any relevance to people, unless it interferes with their daily lives, and so they
dismiss it. Yet, modern spaces do not provide for
people the sense of connection and comfort they experience in nature. Modern spaces instead reinforce
a sense of spiritual void. The poem begins its articulation of this type of meaninglessness in its descriptions of each of individuals inhabiting modern
rooms that are “dark,” the only adjective Merwin
uses in the poem to describe these man-made spaces.
In the beginning of time, there were no rooms,
only a sky that “many have forgotten.” As humans
developed, they created natural rooms consisting
“of stone and ice and a fallen tree.” The speaker
defines these rooms as living spaces, where the
beating of hearts was echoed off of the walls of ice.
These shelters where hearts were born resulted in
a dynamic unification of humans with nature, all
merging into the landscape of the universe.
In the modern world, people have alienated
themselves from this comforting union with a landscape that echoes the barrenness at the core of our
lives. Now, “the echoing wall of ice” remains
empty. Now, people have only childhood memories of a communion with nature, moments when
they remember “thinking of a forest.” People view
the landscape “between moments of remembering
a room at another time.” The “first hands and
voices” of the past existed in the spaces of nature;
yet as people confine themselves in man-made
rooms, the natural spaces become empty, with no
sound to echo off the walls of ice. People catch
glimpses of the mountains now only as they pass
between rooms; the mountains are seen but not
known or appreciated.
Modern rooms refuse to offer the same kind
of shelter as did the natural spaces. The walls do
not echo people’s spirits, and therefore people do
not have a real connection with them. The rooms
remain “dark,” stripped of meaning, alien. People’s
senses do not become engaged in these rooms that
lack any distinctive features. As a result, people are
left feeling incomplete.
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The individuals left
in the rooms refuse to
acknowledge the blankness
of their experience in their
artificial spaces and the
subsequent spiritual void
that results.”
When the speaker notes, “we meet in a room
and go on from room to room,” Merwin suggests
that modern lives consist of meaningless movements in and out of these spaces, artificial boundaries people construct to provide themselves with
a sense of order and completion. As a result, people have turned their backs on anything that exists
outside those boundaries, including the natural
world that presents them with a constant source of
vitality and wonder. The speaker describes the natural rooms as being imbued with a creative and lifesustaining force. Nature creates its own shapes that
can be adapted through the imagination of the inhabitant into a sheltering space where beating
hearts are echoed off of living walls, and where
people communicate with nature and with each
other through their hands and voices.
Today, people’s lack of perspective and imagination becomes reflected in the passivity they exhibit as they “go on living” in their dark, characterless rooms, absent of any distinguishing details.
The only activity conducted in these rooms is sleeping and passing from room to room, suggesting the
somnambulant state of the inhabitants as they face
the meaninglessness of their artificial worlds.
In his descriptions of the sleeping inhabitants
of the rooms, Merwin suggests that people’s selfimposed alienation from nature results in the death
of the soul. The “products” of these rooms, those
individuals who are surrounded and cut off by the
blankness that characterizes these artificial spaces,
are carried to their “final uplands” near the end of
the poem. Yet, even with the threat of this spiritual
death, people continue to “go on from room to
room,” acknowledging that “there was something
before,” but unable to articulate what that something was. People’s focus is solely on what the
room has “become by good fortune,” for these
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modern rooms are the only spaces that they now
value.
Ironically, this anticlimactic ending refuses to
focus on the death of the soul, represented by the
individuals carried to the final uplands. It instead
ends with the false note of accomplishment, that
the goal of attaining the perfect space has been
achieved. Thus the break with the natural world has
been made complete. The individuals left in the
rooms refuse to acknowledge the blankness of their
experience in their artificial spaces and the subsequent spiritual void that results.
Edwin Folsom in his article for Shenandoah
notes that Merwin’s poetry shares a similar subject
to that of the poetry of Walt Whitman in its exploration of American values. Merwin’s themes,
however, as well as his distinctive poetic style, contradicts Whitman’s nineteenth-century romanticism. Folsom writes that Merwin’s poetry “often
implicitly and sometimes explicitly responds to
Whitman; his twentieth century sparsity and soberness . . . answer, temper, Whitman’s nineteenth century expansiveness and exuberance—his enthusiasm over the American creation.”
Merwin’s poetic technique in “Horizons of
Rooms” helps to illustrate and reinforce his thematic focus. The discordant rhythms of his free
verse lines reflect the destructive separation of the
self from the natural world. Each stanza consists of
two lines, but they do not become traditional couplets, refusing to maintain a consistent meter or
rime.
The sense of abrupt separation is reinforced by
the seemingly arbitrary line breaks. Lines end not
at the end of a thought, but in the middle of one,
suggesting a sense of disorder. The breaks, however, have been planned carefully to highlight the
poem’s subject. Ten lines end with the word
“room.” The sense of disorder that emerges from
the broken thoughts coupled with the focus on the
rooms reinforces Merwin’s commentary on the destructiveness of these unnatural spaces. The poem’s
lack of punctuation illustrates the title’s dominant
image: the series of empty images represented by
the succession of rooms merge to become an endless horizon of artificial spaces that prevent from
experiencing the natural world beyond its borders.
The imagery of the poem displays an elemental surrealism that suggests the artificiality of the
modern constructed spaces and the individual’s subconscious response to them. The rooms themselves,
as well as the movement in and out of them, express an unconscious realm of experience, rein-
9 2
forced by the lack of descriptive details. The only
room the inhabitants appear to express a conscious
appreciation of it is nature’s “room,” where beating
hearts echo off of walls, and hands and voices
emerge. When the speaker shifts the focus to modern rooms, the inhabitants appear in a dream-like
state, moving from room to room without purpose
and without noting any differentiating qualities. The
only activity that occurs in these rooms is sleeping,
again reinforcing the unconscious nature of the experience within them. These surrealist elements reinforce the sense of nothingness experienced by the
characters in the modern world, who have constructed spaces that isolate them from nature.
Edward J. Brunner, in his book on Merwin,
notes that humans strive to shape their world
through the construction of “stable orders,” but
Merwin’s poetry insists that the natural world “will
endure and persist while what we shape over and
against it is subject to loss and decay.” In “Horizons of Rooms,” Merwin expresses his disdain for
people’s ignorance of and subsequent separation
from nature and acknowledges the destructive
sense of alienation that results.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “The Horizons
of Rooms,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Brunner, Edward J., “Epilogue” in Poetry as Labor and
Privilege: The Writings of W. S. Merwin, University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 285–91.
Folsom, Lowell Edwin, “Approaches and Removals: W. S.
Merwin’s Encounter with Whitman’s America,” in Shenandoah, Vol. 29, Spring 1978, pp. 57–73.
Jarman, Mark, “An Old Master and Four New Poets,” in
Hudson Review, Vol. XLI, No. 4, Winter 1989, pp. 729–36.
Lieberman, Laurence, Review, in Yale Review, Summer
1968.
Perry, Tony, “A Rage and Sorrow Undiminished by the Passage of Time: At 73, Poet W. S. Merwin Continues to Find
New Ways to Shape the Language,” in Los Angeles Times,
May 30, 2001, p. E1.
Further Reading
Clifton, Michael, “Breaking the Glass: A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. Merwin,” in Chicago Review, Vol. 36,
No. 1, Summer 1998, pp. 65–82.
Published a year after this poem, Clifton’s theory of
poetry does not take “The Horizons of Rooms” into
account, but it does give interesting background to
Merwin’s writing style.
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Connaroe, Joel, Eight American Poets, University of South
Carolina Press, 1997.
This book, a follow-up to Connaroe’s successful Six
American Poets, presents the works of Merwin and
other poets of his generation who are considered his
equals: Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert
Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, and Anne Sexton.
Hix, H. L., Understanding W. S. Merwin, University of
South Carolina Press, 1997.
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This book, part of the Understanding Contemporary
American Literature series, gives an overview of the
changes of Merwin’s career, spanning over forty
years.
Scigaj, Leonard, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets, University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
This book examines the works of Merwin, Wendell
Berry, A. R. Ammons, and Gary Snyder and the relationship between poetry and the environment. It
contains some difficult philosophy that students
might find a little challenging.
9 3
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1842
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“The Lady of Shalott” tells the story of a woman
who lives in a tower in Shalott, which is an island
on a river that runs, along with the road beside it,
to Camelot, the setting of the legends about King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Every
day, the woman weaves a tapestry picture of the
landscape that is visible from her window, including Camelot. There is, however, a curse on her; the
woman does not know the cause of the curse, but
she knows that she cannot look directly out of the
window, so she views the subjects of her artwork
through a mirror that is beside her. The woman is
happy to weave, but is tired of looking at life only
as a reflection. One day, Sir Lancelot rides by, looking bold and handsome in his shining armor, and
singing. The woman goes to the window to look
directly out of it, and the moment she does, she
knows that the curse is upon her. So she leaves the
tower, finds a boat at the side of the river, writes
“The Lady of Shalott” on the side of the boat, and
floats off down the river toward Camelot. As she
drifts along, singing and observing all of the sights
that were forbidden to her before, she dies. The boat
floats past Camelot, and all of the knights make the
sign of the cross upon seeing a corpse go by, but
Lancelot, seeing her for the first time, notes, “She
has a lovely face.”
This poem was first published in 1832, when
Tennyson was 23 years old, in a volume called Poems. Up to that point, Tennyson had received great
critical acclaim, and had won national awards, but
the critics savagely attacked the 1832 book, mostly
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because of poems such as “The Lady of Shalott”
that dealt with fantasy situations instead of realistic ones. The next year, 1833, Tennyson’s best
friend died, which affected the poet as greatly as
would anything in his life. For a long time, during
a period that later came to be known as “the ten
years’ silence,” nothing of Tennyson’s was published. In 1842, a new volume, also called Poems,
was published, to great critical acclaim. The new
book had a slightly revised version of “The Lady
of Shalott,” and this version is the one that is studied today.
Author Biography
Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, in Somersby,
Lincolnshire, England. The fourth of twelve children, he was the son of a clergyman who maintained his office grudgingly after his younger
brother had been named heir to their father’s
wealthy estate. According to biographers, Tennyson’s father, a man of violent temper, responded
to his virtual disinheritance by indulging in drugs
and alcohol. Each of the Tennyson children later
suffered through some period of drug addiction or
mental and physical illness, prompting the family’s
grim speculation on the “black blood” of the Tennysons. Biographers surmise that the general
melancholy expressed in much of Tennyson’s verse
is rooted in the unhappy environment at Somersby.
Tennyson enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827. There he met Arthur Hallam, a brilliant undergraduate who became Tennyson’s closest friend and ardent admirer of his poetry.
Hallam’s enthusiasm was welcomed by Tennyson,
whose personal circumstances had led to a growing despondency: his father died in 1831, leaving
Tennyson’s family in debt and forcing his early departure from school; one of Tennyson’s brothers
suffered a mental breakdown and required institutionalization; and Tennyson himself was morbidly
fearful of falling victim to epilepsy or madness.
Hallam’s untimely death in 1833, which prompted
the series of elegies later comprising In Memoriam,
contributed greatly to Tennyson’s despair. In describing this period, he wrote: “I suffered what
seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired
to die rather than to live.” For nearly a decade after Hallam’s death, Tennyson published no poetry.
During this time, he became engaged to Emily Sellwood, but financial difficulties and Tennyson’s
persistent anxiety over the condition of his health
Lord Tennyson
resulted in their separation. In 1842, an unsuccessful financial venture cost Tennyson nearly everything he owned, causing him to succumb to a deep
depression that required medical treatment. Tennyson later resumed his courtship of Sellwood, and
they were married in 1850. The timely success of
In Memoriam, published that same year, ensured
Tennyson’s appointment as Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth. In 1883, Tennyson
accepted a peerage, the first poet to be so honored
strictly on the basis of literary achievement. Tennyson died October 6, 1892, and was interred in
Poet’s Corner of Westminister Abbey.
Poem Text
I
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
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Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro’ the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four grey walls, and four grey towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
By the margin, willow veil’d,
Slide the heavy barges trail’d
By slow horses; and unhail’d
The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d
Skimming down to Camelot:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to tower’d Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers “’Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”
10
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls.
And there the surly village-churls
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,
Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad
Goes by to tower’d Camelot;
And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often thro’ the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
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II
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
“I am half sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.
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A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling through the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.
The gemmy bridle glitter’d free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down to Camelot:
And from his blazoned baldric slung
A mighty silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armour rung,
Beside remote Shalott.
All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn’d like one burning flame together,
As he rode down to Camelot.
As often through the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
Moves over still Shalott.
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;
On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow’d
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down to Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
“Tirra lirra,” by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
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In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;
Down she came and found a boat
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Beneath a willow left afloat,
And round about the prow she wrote
The Lady of Shalott.
And down the river’s dim expanse
Like some bold seër in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance—
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right—
The leaves upon her falling light—
Thro’ the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turned to tower’d Camelot.
For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And round the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they cross’d themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in His mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”
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Media
Adaptations
• A 1995 videocassette entitled “The Lady of
Shalott”: A Poem and Its Readers is available
from Films for the Humanities & Sciences. It
features a reading of the poem and responses by
a variety of interested people.
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• Encyclopedia Britannica Films produced a 16
mm. film in 1970 called The Lady of Shalott,
with Cecil Bellamy reading the poem, plus a variety of music and visuals related to it.
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• “The Lady of Shalott” is included on a Caedmon recording of The Poetry of Tennyson, read
by Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson. It was recorded in 1972 and is also available on audiocassette.
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Poem Summary
• A four-album set released by Allyn & Bacon in
1955, Master Recordings in English Literature,
includes this poem. V. C. Clinton-Baddeley
reads.
• A two-album set, Narrative Poetry, part of the
London Library of Recorded English series, includes this poem. It was released by Columbia
in 1980, with selections read by Cecil Trouncer,
Julian Randall, John Laurie, and V. C. ClintonBaddeley.
• The second entry in the Argo series, The English Poets from Chaucer to Yeats, is devoted to
Tennyson. This recording, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, made in association with the British
Council and Oxford University Press, includes
selections from Tennyson read by Frank Duncan, Michael Horndurn, and David King.
• “The Lady of Shalott” is depicted in a fantasy
painting by John William Waterhouse in 1875.
The painting became commercially available as
a poster from Shorewood Fine Arts Reproductions in 1999.
Lines 1–9
This poem starts off by giving a visual
overview of the situation. The reader is shown the
river and the road, and, far in the distance, the towers of Camelot. The people mentioned in this section are not given specific identities, rather, they
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are common people going about their daily business. It is from their perspective that the poem first
shows Shalott, an island in the river.
Lines 10–18
The imagery here is of nature, of freedom, of
movement. This is contrasted with the inflexible,
colorless walls and towers of Camelot in line 15.
The flowers in the next line are not described by
their colors or even by their motion in the breeze,
but are “overlooked” by the grey walls, as if they
are held prisoner. This tone of severity in the middle of nature’s healthy activity prepares the reader
for the introduction of the Lady of Shalott in line 18.
Lines 19–27
Lines 19–23 focus again on the human activity going on around the island: small river barges
pass with heavy loads, small, quick boats called
“shallops” skim past the shore around the tower,
referred to here as a “margin.” With all of this activity, the poem asks who has seen the woman who
lives in the tower, implying that she is mysterious,
unknown, “veiled.”
Lines 28–36
In the fourth stanza of Section I, the imagery
changes from relying on the senses of sight and
touch (as implied by the plants’ motions in the wind
in stanza 2) to the sense of sound. The poem tells
us that the lady who lives in the tower has not been
seen, and is known only to the farmers who hear
her singing while they work in their fields so early
in the morning that the moon is still out. Because
they never see her but only hear her singing, the
reapers think of the Lady of Shalott as a spirit, a
“fairy.” Up to this point, the reader has not been
introduced to her either, and knows only as much
about her as those outside of the tower know.
Lines 37–45
The Lady seems to be happy where she is: her
songs echo “cheerly” (line 30) and she weaves her
picture in happy, gay colors (line 38) and she has
no care in the world other than weaving (line 44).
In this stanza, though, the reader finds out that the
Lady will have a curse visited on her if she looks
at Camelot. This idea combines many familiar
themes: readers generally recognize the maiden
trapped in the tower from the tale of Rapunzel or
the maiden placed under a spell from the story of
Sleeping Beauty; in addition, according to Greek
myth, Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, avoided men
who wanted to court her while her husband was
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away by constantly weaving, but then unravelling
her work at night so that she would never be done.
This is an appropriate allusion because both Penelope and the Lady of Shalott use their craft as a
substitute for human involvement. Strangely, the
Lady does not know why she has to avoid direct
interaction, nor does she seem to care.
Lines 46–54
Not able to look directly at the world out of
her window, the Lady observes it through a mirror.
This stanza describes a few of the things she sees
in that mirror. The images she sees are described
as “shadows.” According to the Greek philosopher
Plato, we experience life like a person would who
was chained up inside of the mouth of a cave: he
cannot see out, he can only see the shadows of people passing the cave flickering on the wall and he
thinks that the shadows are reality. In that same
way we all, according to Plato, mistake images of
reality for actual reality, which we cannot see. For
the Lady of Shalott, reality is not the broad landscape but the images (Tennyson calls them “shadows”) she sees in the mirror.
Lines 55–63
The people in this stanza are in motion, going
about their busy lives while hers is solitary and static. Reflected in her mirror she sees a group of
happy girls, a clergyman, a page, and, sometimes,
the knights of Camelot, riding in columns.
Lines 64–72
The action of the poem begins in this stanza,
where the Lady’s attitude changes: in line 55, she
is delighted with the picture she is weaving of the
outside world, but, in line 71, the first time she
speaks, she says she is unhappy with her situation.
In between the two, she observes people participating in events—a funeral is mentioned first, then
a wedding—that make her aware of how lonely it
is to be unable to participate.
Lines 73–81
The image of Sir Lancelot shoots into the
Lady’s mirror with the force of an arrow fired from
the roof just outside of her bedroom window. The
description that Tennyson gives of the knight mixes
his bold, powerful look with his chivalrous actions.
Sunlight glints on his shiny armor, making him look
as if he is on fire, and the speaker of the poem also
tells us that he is the type of knight who always,
even if dressed for battle, took time to kneel when
he encountered a lady. His knighthood confirms that
he is a man of the highest honor and nobility.
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Lines 82–90
Lines 118–126
This second stanza of Section III shifts the description of Lancelot from the visual to the audible.
The bells of his bridle ring “merrily” as he rides,
his armor rings as well, and in his equipment belt,
the “baldric,” is a “mighty bugle”; the musical notes
of which communicate the situation at hand.
The season has changed—earlier in the poem,
when the barley was being harvested (lines 28–29),
the setting was late summer; line 119 describes an
autumn scene (the falling leaves of line 138 support this). Although the time described does not
seem to allow for a change of seasons, the magical element (most obvious in the unexplained
source of the Lady’s curse) creates an atmosphere
where this compression of time is not unreasonable. It is significant that the Lady takes the time
to write her name on the side of the boat: if one accepts the interpretation that the mirror symbolizes
self-knowledge, then she is a woman whose identity has been “shattered” at this point of the poem.
She has no name to sign, just a title (“Lady”) and
a location (“Shalott”).
Lines 91–99
This stanza, in which Sir Lancelot is likened
to a meteor, glowing as if he were on fire, splendid in his armor and “trailing light,” serves to emphasize what an impressive sight he was as he rode
toward Camelot.
Lines 100–108
After the intricate description that the reader
has been given of Lancelot, it is in this stanza, in
line 106, that the Lady is able to see him for the
first time. Tennyson says that he “flashed into the
crystal mirror,” which is fitting because his shining armor seems to flash everywhere he goes, but
it is especially appropriate because the Lady earlier referred to the images in her mirror as “shadows” (line 71), which are of course dark and dull.
Also of significance is that Sir Lancelot sings.
The immediate cause of the Lady’s attraction to
him, the thing that prompts her to look out of the
window, is not visual, but audible; here Tennyson
suggests the fullness of life that the Lady cannot
avoid any longer. Lancelot sings a traditional folk
refrain, which would be historically accurate and
would invoke a sense of nostalgia in readers of Tennyson’s time.
Lines 109–117
Although it is Sir Lancelot’s singing that
makes the Lady tempt fate by going to the window
and looking out, she never actually sees him, just
his helmet and the feather upon it. The irony of this
is buried, however, within the rush of mystical occurrences which indicate that the curse the Lady
mentioned in line 40 is indeed real; the mirror
cracks, the tapestry unravels. This could also be
given a psychological interpretation, with the
events that are presented as “actually” happening
being explained as symbols of what is going on in
the Lady’s head: in this interpretation, the moment
the woman becomes involved in the outside world
her sense of self (the mirror) and of her accomplishments (the tapestry) comes apart, as if social
interaction is a curse to the ego.
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Lines 127–135
“Mischance” means misfortune or bad luck—
the Lady understands that she is doomed as she
looks toward Camelot, which had been so attractive to her that it (in the person of Sir Lancelot)
forced her to look, sealing her fate. Earlier, she
looked at Camelot through a mirror, seeing it where
her own reflection would normally be; in line 130
the look on her face (“countenance”) is described
as glassy, which suggests the mirror, but does not
reflect.
Lines 136–144
“They” mentioned in line 143 are the reapers
who earlier in the poem were so charmed by the
Lady’s voice.
Lines 145–153
The death of the Lady of Shalott is surrounded
with standard death images: cold, darkness, and
mournful singing, among others. This is a transitional stanza, connecting the dying woman’s departure with the dead woman’s arrival at Camelot.
Lines 154–162
The Lady’s corpse is described as “dead-pale”
and “gleaming,” providing a stark visual contrast
to the night as she floats past Camelot. Tennyson
lists the occupants of the castle in line 160, as they
are probably becoming aware of the Lady’s existence for the first time, although she was very aware
of theirs. They are described as curious, going out
of their houses and onto the wharf to look, walking around to read the front of the boat. This stanza
ends leaving the reader to anticipate what effect the
sight will have on the people of Camelot.
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Read about the presidential administration of
John F. Kennedy. Why was it called “Camelot”?
Find particular figures from the Arthurian myths
that correspond to figures in U.S. politics. In particular, who would you say is most like the Lady
of Shalott?
• The Lady of Shalott could only look at the world
through a mirror, but mirrors were quite different in Tennyson’s time than they are now. Research the history of how mirrors are made and
explain how that would affect what she saw.
• Write a poem or a short story that explains how
the Lady of Shalott came to have this curse put
on her.
• This poem has been put to music several times.
Adapt it to your favorite type of music, cutting
out parts that you think are unnecessary. Explain
your choices.
• The Lady of Shalott weaves a picture of what
she sees outside her window. Research tapestries from the Middle Ages and report on what
kinds of images they present and what kinds of
stories they tell.
• Assume that the Lady of Shalott is not under a
curse at all, that she cannot go outside because
of psychological inhibitions. Report on what
treatments are currently available for someone
in her situation.
Lines 163–171
In the first five lines of this stanza, the initial
curiosity of the people of Camelot turns to fear, the
primitive fear of seeing a dead person, and the way
these Christian people respond in order to protect
themselves when frightened is to make the sign of
the cross. Tennyson brings this entire long poem to
a climax at this point: the Lady of Shalott was so
enchanted with the idea of Camelot that she eventually was forced to look out of the window to see
it herself, and in these lines she produces an emotional effect that is almost equally as strong. But
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Lancelot, whose stunning presence affected the
Lady so personally that it ultimately drew her to
her death, looks at her, thinks for “a little space,”
and finally, dispassionately, remarks that she is
pretty. Tennyson makes Lancelot’s next line a standard benediction of the time that might have been
said over anyone, whether friend or stranger.
Themes
Deprivation
In this poem, the main character exists under
a spell without knowing what its origin is or why
it has been put on her and without thinking of how
she can remove it. She seems to accept it as her
fate: “And so she weaveth steadily, / And little other
care has she,” the poem explains. The one stipulation of this mysterious curse is that she cannot look
out her window at the panorama of nature and humanity that is so clearly outlined in the poem’s first
section. She does not seem to care that she is deprived of direct contact with the world. She does
not question why she has been cursed like this. Tennyson does not provide an explanation for the
curse; he does not offer a reason why this woman
is denied the immediate pleasures and problems of
real life. Perhaps the poet wanted the psychology
behind her captivity to be open-ended and to invite
readers to apply various interpretations to her situation and behavior. The important point is that she
is isolated, forced to observe the world indirectly
through a mirror, and she does not seem to object
to this deprivation until her interest in handsome
Lancelot overcomes her initial detachment.
Art and Artifice
The Lady of Shalott’s view of reality depends
on the reflection she perceives in her mirror. Mirrors may be thought of as devices that accurately
duplicate the scene they reflect, but images in mirrors are different than reality. They reverse the subject and relegate it to two dimensions. Moreover,
the objects reflected in this mirror cannot hurt the
Lady of Shalott the same way objects viewed directly can. The reflected scenes of the Camelot
countryside are further altered by her artistic imagination, as she incorporates them into her tapestry:
it is her delight “[t]o weave the mirror’s magic
sights.” The Lady is thus presented as an artist,
more involved in her creative version of her indirect experience than with life experience itself. Indeed, she represents the nineteenth-century em-
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phasis on the problems and issues connected to the
artist’s subjectivity. Reality as she knows it is flat
but gives the sense of depth; she transforms that reality imaginatively with her bright threads, yet she
also renders it two-dimensional. When she faces
actual reality by looking out the window, it breaks
the mirror that she no longer needs to see through
and also destroys her handiwork. Reality makes the
art she has created vanish.
Infatuation
Quite a few critics suggest that the Lady of
Shalott dies of a broken heart because she is suddenly infatuated with the dazzlingly beautiful
Lancelot and he does not return her affection. This
reading applies to the traditional tale that is the
source for the piece; in the story of Elaine of Astolat, Elaine does indeed suffer from rejection. The
Lady of Shalott, however, is a variation on that
character, different in several ways. Tennyson
changed the setting from Astolat to Shalott, an ancient variation of the name. In his poem, the Lady
and Lancelot never meet: when he does see her for
the first time, dead in her boat, he expresses belated interest.
Readers are told of Lancelot’s physical appeal
well before the Lady knows anything about it. He
is described as having a broad, clear brow; his shield
bares a picture of a knight kneeling to a lady and
his saddle is decked with jewels. But what draws
the Lady to look out the window is the sound of his
beautiful singing. As soon as she sees him, her
weaving literally flies out the window, and her mirror cracks. “The curse is come upon me,” she says.
This reaction can be seen as symbolic. Being
distracted by Lancelot brings the curse upon her.
The curse may be understood as the loss of her creative perception of the world. Stated differently,
she loses her way of keeping her mind occupied
with work. In turn, the mirror’s cracking suggests
the idea that she can no longer focus only on artwork once her interest in another person draws her
into the world at large. She is not “rejected” by
Lancelot because, in this version, he is unaware of
her until the end; still, she finds herself so drawn
to him that she takes her life into her own hands,
just to see the face that goes with that voice.
Liberation
After she realizes that the curse has come upon
her, the Lady of Shalott does not die immediately.
Her exposure to the real world, even though it
means her death, also means that she can express
herself directly in the world. She leaves the tower,
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finds a boat, and writes her title on it before lying
in it and casting off. Her trip down the river is her
passive entry into the world of action. Or it could
be understood as her acquiescence to her feelings.
Curiously, even though it is Lancelot who distracts
her from her weaving and thus seals her fate, her
final action does not focus on him. She lets the river
take her where it will, past all of the people and
places she only has intuited partially in the mirror,
and she sings, expressing herself in this moment to
the world around her.
Style
“The Lady of Shalott” is a ballad. There is no standard structure for a ballad, but the term refers to a
poem or a song that tells the story of a person or
people, usually with details that give them qualities that are larger than life.
The poem is divided into four numbered sections, with each section, like a story, rising to a climax before it ends. This structure helps capture the
reader’s interest, enticing the reader to find out
what will happen next. Each section is broken
down, not quite equally, into stanzas, which are
sections in poetry similar to paragraphs in prose.
There are four stanzas in Parts I and II, five stanzas in Part III, and six in Part IV. Keeping the early
sections shorter allows the poet to hold the reader’s
attention.
The stanzas all contain the same basic structure: there are nine lines, with a rhyme scheme of
aaaabcccb. This means that in each stanza the final sounds of the first four lines (coded as the a
sound) are similar; Lines 5 and 9 rhyme (the b
sound); and lines 6, 7, and 8 rhyme with each other.
Unlike some poets, who try to de-emphasize or
conceal rhymes, Tennyson brings attention to
rhymes by making most of the lines end-stopped—
the flow of words is brought to a halt by punctuation. This strong emphasis on rhymes helps to give
the poem the feeling of an ancient tale, since it resembles poems from the time before printing was
developed, when news was carried from town to
town by word of mouth and rhyming aided memorization.
The lines of this poem are written in iambic
tetrameter. An “iamb” is a unit of poetry (referred
to as a “poetic foot”) that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable—in the first line,
for example, the syllables “eith” “side” “riv” and
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“lie” are accented more heavily than the syllables
that come before them. Iambic poetry closely follows the up-and-down pattern of English speech,
making the poem’s structure hardly noticeable.
Tetrameter means that there are four feet to each
line (“tetra” is the Greek word for “four”), for a total of eight syllables to each line.
Historical Context
Arthurian Legend
The character Tennyson calls the Lady of
Shalott is based on Elaine of Astolat, one of the
figures from the legend of King Arthur. Traditionally, she was identified only as “demoiselle
d’escalot,” the fair maid of Astolat. It was Sir
Thomas Malory who gave her the name “Elaine”
in his 1485 book Le Morte d’Arthur. Tennyson
wrote about her as Elaine, the Lilly Maid of Astolat, in The Idylls of the King published in 1885, but
in his poem, “The Lady of Shalott” he has taken
liberties, leaving her without a name and changing
“Astolat” to the archaic “Shalott.” In both versions,
the character dies of unrequited love for Sir
Lancelot and floats down the river in a barge, to be
wondered about by the common people who are
going about their daily concerns.
The legends of King Arthur and his knights are
mythical, although many researchers have put forth
theories about the actual historical existence of the
people they describe. The legends began appearing
during the Middle Ages, between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. The earliest record of a King Arthur
is in a seventh-century Welsh text. Arthurian stories
were told all over Europe, particularly in France. The
first continuous narrative of the legend, with most
of the knights and supporting characters and specific
episodes that readers know in the twenty-first century, appeared in the Historia Regum Britainne
(“History of the Kings of Britain”) by the English
writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, published in or
around 1139. It was this book that identified the
Arthur of Camelot as the sixth-century king, son of
Uther Pendragon, who kept council with his court
of knights at a round table and was married to Guinevere. Other historians have guessed that there were
other kings named Arthur who could have inspired
the legends.
Lancelot, the bold knight who is mentioned in
this poem, is not mentioned in the earlier legends.
He first appears in the late twelfth century, in Le
Chevalier de Charette by Chrétien de Troyes and
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Lanzelot by Ulrich von Zatzikhofen. This character quickly became an integral part of the myth, a
favorite character because he embodies the qualities of courage and chivalry that befit the tales.
According to legend, Lancelot is born “Galahad” but has his name changed early in life when
his family is killed by a fire (he later has a son
named Galahad with Elaine of Corbenic, who is
different than Elaine of Astolat). He is raised by
“The Lady of the Lake,” a mystical character who
is said to have given Arthur the sword, Excalibur,
which establishes him as king. It is her influence
that establishes Lancelot on his eighteenth birthday
as a knight of the Round Table. There, he proves
to be the most valiant knight, but he also becomes
treacherous: he and Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, fall
in love and have an affair.
It is their sexual relationship that destroys the
court at Camelot. When Arthur finds out about it,
he orders Guinevere to be executed for treason.
Lancelot and his army attack, spiriting the queen
away and killing many knights. Guinevere is returned to Arthur, and Lancelot goes to France,
where he establishes a rival court. In later years,
the animosity between the two men cools, and
Lancelot returns to Camelot before Arthur’s death
to ask his forgiveness. He then retires to live a secluded, monkish life at his castle.
Romanticism
In terms of literary movements, Tennyson is
most closely associated with the Victorian era.
Queen Victoria liked his work and appointed him
Poet Laureate of Britain, a post he held from 1850
to 1892. The first version of this poem appeared in
1833, though, when Tennyson was in his twenties.
Its sensibilities reveal a closer attachment to the
Romantic movement, which was at its peak at that
time.
No category can capture the sensibilities of all
of the artists who worked in a particular time, but
it is sometimes helpful to name philosophical
movements and to group thinkers with similar ideas
in order to get a sense of the prevailing mood of
an era. Romanticism was the prevailing mood at
the end of the eighteenth century and well into the
nineteenth. It is a reaction against the previous
mood, which is called the Enlightenment, so named
because it emphasized rationality, which led to the
drive for political equality as the most rational way
for states to govern. Two thinkers associated with
the Enlightenment are Thomas Jefferson and JeanJacques Rousseau, both of whom were instrumen-
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1842: An important source of entertainment is
books and magazines. More middle-class people are familiar with the mythic stories as they
have been preserved in literature for generations.
Today: There is still some familiarity with King
Arthur’s Court, but most people know it as it is
depicted in movies or in theme park recreations.
• 1842: The English countryside is more open and
unpolluted. Cities, particularly London, are
crowded and polluted, but people who have been
to the country can easily imagine the landscape
that Tennyson describes.
Today: For the most part, the English countryside is divided into walled-off fields and farm
tracks. Since coal burning is illegal in cities, urban air pollution is reduced.
tal in encouraging the cause of democracy over the
rule of monarchs, and their writings contributed to
the motivations behind the American and French
Revolutions. The Enlightenment produced intellectual philosophers, and the art of the period was
called Neo-Classical because it incorporated the
logic, order, and balance of classical Greek art.
(Neo-Classicism co-occurs with explorations of
Greek and Roman ruins in Greece and Italy.)
Many historians recognize the start of the Romantic Period as occurring about 1800, when
William Wordsworth set forth a new theory of poetry in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The Preface
summarizes some important traits of Romanticism:
an emphasis on feeling as the source of creativity,
a preference for subjectivity, an overall devotion to
nature as a symbolic code for spiritual truth, and
a desire to give voice to oppressed and rustic people. Poetry, Wordsworth said, “is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in
tranquility.” Poetry, then, is the expression of human feeling as it is remembered and continues to
be felt. In the shadow of the French Revolution,
English writers like William Blake and Samuel
Coleridge expressed similar sensibilities.
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• 1842: Alfred Tennyson was a young, struggling
poet who had to quit writing for a time because
he could not pay his bills.
Today: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is considered an
important writer and his works are studied in
English literature courses.
• 1842: Scientists do not understand microbiological causes for death, which makes it more
mysterious; thus, poets explore rich metaphorical possibilities for explaining what causes sudden death.
Today: Microbiology explains many symptoms
to be caused by viruses and fungi, and science
measures correlations between physical health
and longevity and psychological and emotional
well-being.
The second phase of Romanticism, from 1805
to the 1830s, produced other writers associated with
the term, the most famous of whom are John Keats,
Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron (born George Gordon). In addition to stressing feeling, writers continued an earlier interest in national history and
folklore. Sir Walter Scott wrote historical novels
about legendary English characters; John Keats (as
well as many others) rewrote the Robin Hood legends; and Tennyson focused on the tales of the
Knights of the Round Table. Another relevant element is an interest in the occult and in morbidity;
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is an
example as are the nightmarish visions in the
poetry of the U.S. writer Edgar Allan Poe.
Critical Overview
Tennyson’s early poems are not often analyzed by
twentieth-century critics because his later pieces
are considered much more thought provoking: as
early as 1895, George Saintsbury noted that “‘The
Lady of Shalott’ does not count among the poems
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that established Tennyson’s title to the first rank of
English poets.” Still, to the same critic, it is one of
the poet’s “happiest” pieces, not because of the subject matter—after all, a curse kills the Lady in the
end—but because of Tennyson’s skillful use of
words. “There is such a latent charm in mere words,
cunning collocations, and in the voice ringing in
them,” famed poet Walt Whitman wrote, “which
[Tennyson] caught and has brought out, beyond all
others.” Among the poems that he goes on to list
as examples of this is “The Lady of Shalott.”
Though its subject matter is considered by
scholars to be light, there has been no denying that
it was influential in its time and is probably responsible for other works of art with similar
themes. Critic John D. Jump noted in his 1974 book
about Tennyson that “‘The Lady of Shalott’ shows
how readily [Tennyson’s language] can give access
to that medieval dream world which attracted so
many nineteenth-century writers and painters.”
Arthur Noyse noted that “his early Arthurian poems practically founded the pre-Raphaelite school
in England.” Whatever impression the modern
reader has of Camelot and the age of chivalry, it
probably bears some influence from Tennyson and
the stunning pictures of that long-ago time that he
painted with his words.
Criticism
David Kelly
Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College
and an associate professor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and has
written extensively for academic publishers. In this
essay, Kelly examines how the differences between
the 1833 and 1842 published versions of “The Lady
of Shalott” helped focus readers’ attention on the
psychological point Tennyson was trying to make.
The story told in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem
“The Lady of Shalott” obviously lacks a key narrative element, making it, at least in theory, a
flawed attempt at storytelling. Handled less skillfully, it might easily have been rejected by readers
and literary critics as a weak attempt to use powerful language to make up for its storytelling deficiencies. The poem concerns a damsel who lives in
a stone tower, threatened by a curse that she knows,
somehow, will kill her if she looks out her window
at the world that surrounds her. The curse is real;
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she does look, and she dies. The basic question that
must go through the mind of anyone who reads this
poem is how the curse came to be. Tennyson could
not have failed to notice what an important aspect
of the story he left out.
Assuming, then, that Tennyson left this crucial
information out on purpose, it is very likely that he
had that same purpose in mind while making
changes to the poem between the first and second
published versions, dated, respectively, 1833 and
1842. Neither version could have been written with
the goal of writing a clear story, not with that glaring omission, and the revision does nothing to fill
in the missing details. But adding up all of these
oddities draws a line to Tennyson’s true purpose.
A comparison between the two versions shows
more than just corrections or adjustments in the
1842 revision. The later version is even more mysterious than the original, which, unexpectedly,
makes it more human.
The main reason that this poem is able to successfully present a magic spell without explaining
why or how that spell occurred is its setting. The
story takes place in Camelot, a mythical land that,
if it ever actually existed, certainly was not the
kingdom that the ancient stories present. Popular
imagination has attached itself to the historical
facts, adding stories about Merlin the sorcerer, the
Lady of the Lake, and the magical Sword in the
Stone, Excalibur, that could only be handled by a
person who was good and wise. Because magic is,
by its very definition, outside of the ordinary laws
of nature, there is a tendency to accept it as unknowable and to leave issues of magic unexamined.
But it is wrong to assume that magic has no
rules at all. Like the myths of ancient Greece and
Rome, the medieval stories of the Knights of the
Round Table used magic to pass judgements on
morality. For example, Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from the Trojan War was said to have
been caused by his failing to properly offer a
homage to the god Poseidon. Similarly, Lancelot,
Camelot’s bravest and most chivalrous knight, is
not able to find the coveted Holy Grail because of
his affair with Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. Thus the
honor of finding the Grail is passed to Lancelot’s
son. The major difference is that the Greek myths
were based on religious customs, while the magic
involved in the Arthurian legends affirmed Christian principles. Saying that the curse on the Lady of
Shalott is “magical” does not remove the need for
a cause, even if it helps to dampen readers’ curiosity.
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In both versions of this poem, Tennyson worked
against natural human curiosity, tweaking it without
satisfying it. Doing so tells readers that the details
surrounding the curse are really not important to his
message. In some ways, Tennyson’s method anticipates Modernism, which did not actually develop
until the 1920s. The First World War (1914–1918)
was so catastrophic that it changed many systems of
thought, including literary theory. The Modernist poetry that resulted did more than just dictate poetic
information to readers and invite them to appreciate
the poet’s verbal skill: it acknowledged that readers
are aware that they are reading a poem that somebody wrote. “The Lady of Shalott” counts on its
readers to be aware of its author’s existence and to
wonder about the thought process that led him to
leave out critical information. The only sensible explanation that readers can arrive at is that he means
to downplay the mystical aspect of this myth and to
focus attention on the psychology of the character
who is the poem’s focus.
There are only a few differences between the
version of the poem published in 1833 and Tennyson’s 1842 revision, but, surprisingly, they serve
to make the setting and the character even more obscure. Usually, poetry tries to render a vivid experience, and so an author’s changes often serve to
make the visual experience clearer, not hazier.
Again, the assumption must be that Tennyson is
trying to push the irrelevant aspects deeper into the
background, with the hope that readers will focus
more on personality than on situation.
The 1833 version of the poem tells readers
what the Lady of Shalott looks like in two extended
passages. The first is in the poem’s fourth stanza,
at the end of the first section. Details bring her to
life, giving her an actual, physical presence. “A
pearlgarland winds her head,” the poem explains:
“She leaneth on a velvet bed, / Fully royally appareled, / The Lady of Shalott.” At this point the revision, which follows the same general shape, describes the reaper in the field, listening to her song,
rather than describing her looks. This brings in
more a sense of the surrounding world, less a sense
of the Lady.
The earlier version also has an entire stanza of
physical description that Tennyson later removed.
After the first stanza of the fourth section, after she
has already come out of the castle, written her name
on the boat, and climbed into it to float down river,
the original poem says:
A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight,
All raimented in snowy wight
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A comparison
between the two versions
shows more than just
corrections or adjustments
in the 1842 revision. The
later version is even more
mysterious than the
original, which,
unexpectedly, makes it more
human.”
That loosely flew, (her zone in sight,
Clasped with one blinding diamond bright,)
Though the squally eastwind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly
Lady of Shalott.
This version is specific about her clothes, her
posture, and her general demeanor. The 1842 version is not only less descriptive about her looks,
but it removes any detail about her visual presence
altogether.
Another part that changed from one version to
the next was the poem’s initial emphasis on death.
The early version is much more graphic; in the
stanza before the last it includes the lines, “A pale,
pale corpse she floated by, / Deadcold, between the
houses high, / Dead toward Camelot.” The corresponding lines in the revised version read, “A
gleaming shape she floated by, / Dead-pale between
the houses high, / Silent into Camelot.” The revised
poem does mention death, indicating that Tennyson’s intention remained to be clear that she dies.
Yet the emphasis on death in the newer version is
softened, which shifts its emphasis from spectacle
to meditation.
W. David Shaw, in a 1976 essay for the Cornell University Press, noted that the two versions
highlight the ways in which Tennyson “wavers between the impulse to write poems of pure sensation . . . and his impulse to test and enlarge his poetry.” Shaw uses this difference to show differences
in poetic theory from the Romantic period and the
Victorian period (Queen Victoria took the throne
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” deals
with the sudden death of a woman the speaker
has loved, “many many years ago, in a kingdom
by the sea.” Poe’s poetic music matches Tennyson’s. Originally published in 1845, it is available in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar
Allan Poe, published by Vintage Books in 1995.
• Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the legend of
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table, titled Le Morte D’Arthur, was published
in 1485 by William Caxton and is still one of
the most influential sources used today for information about the myth. It is available in an
unabridged edition, a reprint of the Caxton original, from Sterling Publications, copyright 2000.
• John Steinbeck, the twentieth-century author
who is best known for his realistic novels such
as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath,
wrote one of the best updated versions of the
Arthurian legend in his Acts of King Arthur and
His Noble Knights, available from Noonday
Press, 1993.
book Idylls of the King, which is all about the
legends associated with King Arthur. Portions
of the book were published between 1859 and
1885, when the first complete edition appeared.
• Patricia A. McKillip’s novel The Tower at Stony
Wood, published in 2000 by Berkley/Ace, is
based on the story of “The Lady of Shalott.” The
imagery gives a strong sense of the world that
Tennyson discusses in this poem, although
much of the story is different.
• Readers can see how a nineteenth-century U.S.
writer imagined coping with being among the
knights of the Round Table in Mark Twain’s
satiric novel A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court, his response to reading Malory’s version of the legends. Originally published in 1889, this novel is available from Bantam Classics in a 1994 edition.
in 1837, right between these two versions). Without even considering the significance to literary history of these two versions of the poem, it is still interesting to consider the two motives that Shaw
attributes to Tennyson: the earlier version, the one
that emphasizes death and the maiden’s looks, is
the one that he calls poetry written for “pure sensation,” and in fact it is the one that gives the most
chilling sensation.
Ultimately, each version is defined by its final
lines. The first time the poem was published, the
last stanza focused on the local people, referred to
earlier in both versions as the “surly villagechurls,” who gather around the boat in amazement
at the sight of a beautiful dead woman that they do
not know. Lancelot may or may not be with them
in this earlier form; certainly, the germ of the idea
of making him an observer was there because Tennyson mentions a knight in the assembled crowd.
This version ends with a quote from the Lady, written on a parchment that rests on her breast: “The
web was woven curiously, / The charm is broken
utterly, / Draw near and fear not—this is I, / The
Lady of Shalott.” The version of 1842, of course,
has Lancelot approach the boat and presents his
words, not hers, in the last few lines. He comments
on her lovely face. Instead of the simple pathos of
the baffled farm people finding out about her existence from a note that she has pinned to herself in
death, something like a suicide note to strangers,
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• Tennyson included a poem entitled “Lancelot
and Elaine,” which stays truer to the traditional
legends about the relationship between the
Round Table knight and Elaine of Astolat, in his
• Nineteenth-century poet and novelist, Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps, covers the subject of this poem
several times, most notably in her poem “Elaine
and Elaine,” written in 1885 and published in
the 1891 collection Songs of the Silent World,
which is still available through some library systems.
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the revision brings the story around to the person
who unwittingly caused her death. It is mysterious
and somewhat ironic in itself, but the true humanizing element is in the fact that Lancelot is attracted
to her, perhaps as much as she was to him, but that
neither of them will ever know.
In both versions of this poem, Tennyson managed to skirt the central issue of what it is that kills
the Lady of Shallot. For those who take the poem
at face value, believing the events as they are given,
she is killed by a curse, one that the Lady knows
specific details about but that Tennyson does not
share with his readers. A cynic who does not believe in magic can read the curse as being symbolic
for some psychological state that keeps her from
social interaction, one that Lancelot’s beautiful
singing voice draws her from, but that does little
to explain why she would be this way. The most
satisfying clues to why Tennyson chose to do it this
way come from the changes he made while revising. Removing the most graphic signs of death and
corpses gives more leeway for interpreting her
“death” as a symbolic consequence for leaving her
safe abode. Removing her physical presence takes
the poem even further from reality, forcing readers
to imagine her, giving the whole situation a more
unreal setting, as a drama that plays out in her mind
instead of in the physical world. And bringing
Lancelot in at the end stresses the conflict between
the Lady’s view of the world and the world’s view
of her. In the first reality, she and Camelot exist
beside each other with no interaction, but
Lancelot’s interest in her in the revised view implies an emotional bond that did exist but that was
cut down by this mysterious curse. Readers do not
need to know what this curse is in order to feel
sorry for the Lady of Shalott and for Lancelot, and,
by extension, for all of humanity.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “The Lady of
Shalott,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Carl Plasa
In the following essay, Plasa examines contradictory representations of women, their sexuality, and their social roles in “The Lady of Shalott.”
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1842) is often
read by critics as a poem centrally concerned with
the question of the relation between “art” and
“life,” conditions respectively symbolized in the
worlds of Shalott and “many-towered Camelot.”
The poem resolves this question, it is usually argued, by the recognition that “life” is inherently antipathetic to the possibility of an ongoing artistic
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As befits a text
whose operations are
profoundly equivocal, the
landscape into which ‘The
Lady of Shalott’ draws its
reader is one precisely
ordered in terms of
opposition and
division. . . .”
production—an insight taken in turn to be enacted
by the death which befalls the Lady who gives the
poem its title in the course of her attempted sortie
from the one realm of the poem to the other. A paradigmatic formulation of this canonical approach
is provided by Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert
Stange in their anthology, Victorian Poetry and Poetics (1959). According to their notes to the poem,
“The Lady of Shalott” suggests
that the artist must remain in aloof detachment,
observing life only in the mirror of the
imagination, not mixing in it directly. Once the
artist attempts to lead the life of ordinary men his
poetic gift, it would seem, dies.
So persistent is this view that Alastair W.
Thomson similarly claims, thirty years later, that
Tennyson’s poem “represents the dilemma of the
introspective artist, condemned to a life of shadows, and risking destruction if he turns to reality.”
No reading is ideologically innocent, however—least of all a canonical one (which, in these
instances, also blithely turns the “she” of the text
into the “he” of its readers)—and the ideology of
approaches which see “The Lady of Shalott” as a
proto-Yeatsian allegory of choice between “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” might be described as implicitly “utilitarian”: by reading Tennyson’s poem as “a myth of the poetic imagination”
and concluding that the artist/poet must remain
antithetically and irrevocably divorced from “life,”
the critic simultaneously consigns the text to just
that condition of purely aesthetic limbo which
largely defines the Lady’s plight throughout the
poem.
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What the canonical/utilitarian approach fails to
take into account, in other words, is the question
of the relation of the poem itself to “life”—its implication, that is, in the specificities of its own historical moment. Hence it remains blind to the existence of a certain conflict between what “The
Lady of Shalott” says about the art/life relation and
the way in which that relation is instantiated and
configured by the text itself. At the level of the
symbolic narrative within the poem, art and life
would indeed seem to be fatally opposed to one another and the text to offer a reluctant manifesto for
the romantically isolated poet. Yet, as Joseph Chadwick has shown, “The Lady of Shalott” itself constitutes an art-work produced and indeed enabled—
albeit obliquely—through an active engagement
with its own contemporary moment. For Chadwick,
“despite the feudal setting of the poem … it is Tennyson’s own social order, not the one from which
he drew the Lady and Lancelot” that creates “the
problems of autonomy and privacy [the poem] confronts.” In this respect, the dialogue of the poem
with its historical context ironically refutes the necessity for aesthetic withdrawal from “life” or history which it appears internally to affirm. Far from
being mutually exclusive, what Tennyson’s poem
conversely demonstrates is that art and life, the aesthetic and the political, are fully interwoven: the involvement in the social world which is symbolically the destination of the Lady in the poem is,
from the first, a condition at which the poem has
already arrived. As such, “The Lady of Shalott”
bears out Alan Sinfield’s contention that “even poetry which appears to be remote from political issues is in fact involved in the political life of its
society.”
either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and
of rye.” Yet the opening description of place includes a detail whose effect is to disrupt the coherence of another opposition—between illusion
and reality—which is central to the organization of
symbolic space within the poem as a whole. While
firmly divided from one another, Tennyson’s
“fields,” we are told, nonetheless “meet the sky”
fashioning a conjunction which, as Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. points out, is purely the result of an optical illusion. Though the text seeks to confine the
presence of illusions solely to “The island of Shallot”, it is evident from the outset that they exist in
realms beyond its boundaries. Even before the opposition between “the silent isle” and Camelot can
develop into an opposition between “the region of
shadows [and] that of realities,” the latter opposition is itself being skeptically revealed as illusory,
problematic, in some way flawed.
Tensions between the setting up and upsetting
of distinctions are operative not only in terms of
the relation between illusion and reality but also at
the level of the representation of gender difference
in the poem, raising—as such—the question of its
sexual politics. Feminist criticism maintains that
the categories of gender (as opposed to sex)—
“masculinity” and “femininity”—are not naturally
or self-evidently given but instead ideologically
produced by society and culture. Insofar as these
categories are at the same time hierarchically organized in favor of men, the ground of their production is, as feminism also argues, a patriarchal
one. The ideological sleight-of-hand by which patriarchy mystifies or tropes the cultural as the natural (thus preserving its dominion) is neatly summarized by Griselda Pollock:
One of the concerns at the heart of the political (as well as intellectual, social, and cultural) life
of Tennyson’s nineteenth-century context is, as
criticism generally acknowledges, the “Woman
Question.” While “The Lady of Shalott” addresses
this question, it does so, as will be shown, in a systematically ambivalent manner, at once upholding
and dislocating patriarchal assumptions about the
issues which the question entails—those of gender,
sexuality, the institution of marriage, and the space
occupied by women in society.
Patriarchy does not refer to the static, oppressive
domination by one sex over another, but to a web of
psycho-social relationships which institute a socially
significant difference on the axis of sex which is so
deeply located in our very sense of lived, sexual,
identity that it appears to us as natural and unalterable.
I
As befits a text whose operations are profoundly equivocal, the landscape into which “The
Lady of Shalott” draws its reader is one precisely
ordered in terms of opposition and division: “On
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The way in which the relations between the
sexes, which constitute power-relations also, are
ideally woven for and by patriarchy is itself graphically outlined in a passage from Tennyson’s The
Princess: A Medley, published in 1847, five years
after the appearance of the revised version of “The
Lady of Shalott”:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
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These lines return us, by contrast, to “The Lady
of Shalott,” a text whose stance toward patriarchal
ideology is substantially less didactic than that propounded by the old king—the Prince’s father—who
is their speaker.
At first glance, however, it would appear that,
despite the medievalism of the poem, the disposition of social space in “The Lady of Shalott” accurately replicates, as the citation from Chadwick
implies, the gender conventions informing Victorian society. On the one hand, the Lady is consigned to a private and socially peripheral space of
“Four gray walls, and four gray towers,” located
on the far side of a “margin, willow-veiled”, while
on the other, the public realm of Camelot is inhabited by “bold Sir Lancelot”: mythic past conforms to socio-historic present, as private and
public spaces are respectively identified with “femininity” and “masculinity” in both.
Considered as a response to the patriarchal
norms embodied in the Shalott/Camelot opposition,
the inclination of Tennyson’s poem appears—from
the perspective of narrative structure—to be to support and maintain them. While the central action in
the text concerns the Lady’s attempted performance
of a crossing from private/“feminine” to public/“masculine” worlds, this movement is one
which, strictly speaking, goes uncompleted, or is
permitted to occur only posthumously:
For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
Intercepting the Lady’s crossing by means of
death, the narrative of the poem registers its own
resistance to the transgression of gender divisions—and hence the possibility of political
change—of which that crossing is the sign.
As the index of resistance to such a possibility, the death which the text eventually imposes
upon the Lady is only the formal or explicit culmination of a process which commences much earlier. This process works, through a series of strategies, to transform the future toward which the Lady
travels into a repetition of the past she seeks to escape, thus creating the illusion that the patriarchally
subversive crossing from Shalott to Camelot is itself illusory, since a future that repeats a past effectively erases the present that ordinarily facilitates the passage from one to the other. The first of
these strategies occurs precisely at the point, in fact,
at which the Lady prepares to leave Shalott: “She
left the web, she left the loom, / She made three
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paces through the room.” If these lines retard even
the motion they describe—the Lady’s crossing of
her studio—through syntactic repetition, arresting
“paces” into stasis, they are similarly and secondly
followed by the typographical effacement of the
larger crossing from Shalott to Camelot in the shape
of the blank space between the third and fourth sections of the poem. The Lady’s emergence on the
other side of this space is accompanied by a sudden shift in seasons—from “the blue unclouded
weather” of summer to autumn:
In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over towered Camelot;
Down she came and found a boat.
With this shift, as Chadwick notes, the Lady
“finds a world just as gray as the one she has left”,
as the future again repeats the past.
The pattern of temporal inversion and elision
we are outlining constitutes, to recapitulate, a kind
of proleptic supplement to that resistance to the
(ideologically disruptive) crossing from Shalott to
Camelot which is made textually explicit with the
Lady’s death at lines 150–153. This pattern extends
to include a further detail. Though, at line 115, the
Lady’s mirror is dramatically “cracked from side
to side,” it would appear, at line 130, to have been
uncannily restored, in the figuration of her face—
newly directed toward Camelot—as a “glassy
countenance” (emphasis added). The effect of this
detail—like that of those noted above—is implicitly to invert the Lady’s voyage d’amour, slyly fold
it back upon itself. Not only blocking the transition
from Shalott to Camelot with death but also signaling its resistance to the subversion of patriarchal
values which that action connotes through a range
of subliminal gestures, “The Lady of Shalott” thus
fairly lucidly confirms Arthur Hallam’s definition
of the contemporary poetic impulse as “a check acting for conservation against a propulsion toward
change”.
But the paradox which appears to render the
strategies of resistance in the poem superfluous is
that while the movement from Shalott to Camelot,
“feminine” to “masculine” spaces, is symbolically
transgressive, the desire which initially prompts it
would seem, at the end of the second section of the
poem, to be entirely compatible with patriarchal
norms:
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
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A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott.
The “natural” reading of the last four lines of
this stanza (alleged by Hallam Tennyson to contain
“the key to this tale of ‘magic symbolism’” is one
which turns the Lady’s cry, “‘I am half sick of
shadows,’” in the direction of an unequivocally
confessional desire to substitute participation in the
lived reality of marital love for the contemplation
of its image. Even as the Lady’s movement from
Shalott to Camelot figures the deregulation of patriarchal gender codes and is variously resisted by
the text, the desire which propels it—being for marriage—seems to work to reestablish the text in a
relation of continuity with the patriarchal status
quo.
Yet to define the Lady’s discontent with the
conditions of her existence as stemming from the
self-conscious recognition of marriage as the telos
of her desire is to mask the inscription of a subversive counter-meaning beneath the conformities
of the textual surface of the poem, converting it into
an instance of the Barthesian text of plaisir “that
comes from culture and does not break with it,
[and] is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.” As frequently noted, it is possible to translate
the predicament described in “The Lady of Shalott”
into the terms of a neo-Platonic allegory. Just as in
the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, the work of art
duplicates a reality itself only the copy of a higher
realm of “essences,” so the labor of the female
artist in Tennyson’s text is the weaving of the
“magic web” out of the images which appear in her
mirror as “shadows of the world”, the reality of
Camelot. But this is by no means to exhaust the allegorical potential of Tennyson’s poem. As the site
of the production of images—one of which is that
of the newlyweds—which effectively are reality for
the one whom they entrap, the Lady’s “mirror
clear” is not only analogous to the Platonic realm
of “appearances” (figured, in Republic Book 7, as
the wall of a cave on which the shadows of the
absolute manifest themselves) but also to the mediation of experience by the processes of ideological re-presentation. In the contest of the construction of gender, these processes operate, as Pollock
puts it,
by means of winning our identification with the versions of masculinity and femininity which are represented to us…. binding us into a particular—but always unstable—regime of sexual difference.
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“All else confusion.” To view the Lady’s mirror from this perspective, seeing its “magic sights”
as the mesmeric products of ideology, is equally to
lead her cry in a different—indeed antithetical—
direction to that which the “natural” reading comfortably assigns to it. Far from signaling a desire
for marriage, the declaration “‘I am half sick of
shadows’” comes to seem symptomatic of a suggestive—and subversive—demystification of the
institution of marriage as adequately expressive of
female desire, sexual or otherwise. In the same way
that the Lady’s mirror hosts a panoply of images
which significantly does not include her own, so
Tennyson’s poem covertly suggests its heroine’s
failure to identify herself with the patriarchal ideology which precisely posits marriage as integral
to the completion of the destinies of women within
Victorian society. Appropriately, the non-accommodation of the female subject to the narrative of
an orthodox “femininity” occurs “when the moon
[is] overhead,” a moment symbolically associated,
through the moon’s own culturally defined link
with menstruation, with one of the aspects of womanhood which Victorian definitions of “femininity”
tend to repress.
Signifying as much the rejection of as the desire for marriage-as-telos, the Lady’s utterance discloses a “key” which aporetically turns—like the
poem as a whole—in two directions at the same
time, both toward and away from patriarchy. If, as
Tennyson instructs Boyd Carpenter, “the thought
within the image is much more than any one interpretation”, the effect of the subtextual excess at
this point is subversively to expose a certain disjunction between the female subject and the construction or interpellation of that subject as “feminine” by patriarchal ideology. In so doing it also
discloses the rationale which governs those apparently supererogatory strategies of resistance to the
transition from Shalott to Camelot discussed above.
II
Gestures toward the subversion of the gender
positions which patriarchal ideology seeks to promote, in Pollock’s phrase, as “natural and unalterable” are additionally inscribed throughout the text
in a number of ways, the first of which occurs at
the end of the opening section of the poem:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
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Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.’
As Herbert F. Tucker points out (following Lionel Stevenson), Tennyson’s image of the Lady as
an invisible singer defines her as a figure for the
Romantic poet derived from Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and particularly from the Shelleyan comparison of the “blithe Spirit” his poem eulogizes to a
“high-born maiden / In a palace-tower.” But, as
Tucker also notes, the lines cited above simultaneously incorporate an allusion to Wordsworth and
“The Solitary Reaper.” Thus alluding to Shelley
and Wordsworth, Tennyson’s poem is itself as
much “a song that echoes” as that produced by the
disembodied voice within it. But the Tennysonian
echo of Wordsworth is an echo with what turns out
to be a sexual difference, closer in fact to a kind of
intertextual mirroring or simultaneous play of reflection and inversion. In Wordsworth’s poem it is
the male poet who listens—effectively transfixed—
to the song of a female reaper, but in “The Lady
of Shalott” we encounter a male reaper who hearkens, equally spellbound, to the song of a female
poet, “‘the fairy/Lady of Shalott’” Tennyson’s
poem reproduces the Wordsworthian poet/reaper
configuration but inverts it at the level of gender,
placing the poet on the female side of the opposition and the reaper on the male side. The transgression of gender boundaries which “The Lady of
Shalott” both symbolizes and blocks is discretely
carried out by means of allusion as the poem unsettles the ideological fixities it vies equally to sustain.
Subversiveness of allusion is complemented in
the penultimate stanza of the third section of the
poem by a subversiveness of refrain. Prior to this
point, and for the most part beyond it, the refrains
of the poem are consistently organized in terms of
strict gender distinctions. In each stanza the first
refrain, located at its center, is reserved for references either to Camelot or Lancelot, while the second, located at the end or “margin” of the stanza,
is given over to Shalott and the Lady. While the
distribution of refrains in the poem could itself be
said to be patriarchal (identifying the “masculine”
as central and marginalizing the “feminine”), the
customary pattern is significantly and symbolically
usurped at this juncture, since it is a reference to
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Lancelot that appears in the space traditionally allocated to the “feminine”:
From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
Though Lancelot lacks the “sword” essential
to the conception of manhood outlined by the old
king in The Princess, he is nonetheless constantly
defined through images of phallic power. Distanced
from the Lady’s “bower-eaves” by a “bow-shot,”
he rides a “war-horse” that suggestively parts the
“barley-sheaves”, he possesses a “blazoned
baldric” and “mighty silver bugle”, his “helmet and
… helmet-feather” burn “like one burning flame
together”, and he is likened to a “bearded meteor,
trailing light.” Yet despite the emphatically phallic
terms in which the person of Lancelot is represented, he is here transferred to a space the refrainstructure of the poem defines as “feminine.” As
with the allusion to Wordsworth, “The Lady of
Shalott” obliquely accomplishes, in terms of refrain, that re-inscription of gender boundaries
which it both threatens and thwarts at the level of
its symbolic narrative. Moreover, the resituating of
Lancelot—his crossing from one side of the gender line operative at the level of the refrain to the
other—is preceded by the utterance “‘Tirra lirra.’”
While the context from which it is taken (Autolycus’ song in The Winter’s Tale 4.3) endows it with
the connotations of a promiscuous male sexuality,
the shape of the utterance—being that of a “feminine” rhyme—has the precisely subversive
counter-effect of unmanning the singer. As with
Lancelot, so with the Lady who parallels and indeed surpasses his movement into the space the
structure of the poem reserves for the “feminine”
with her own threefold penetration (“She looked
down to Camelot,” “Did she look to Camelot,”
“She floated down to Camelot,” into that which it
ordinarily sets aside for all things “masculine.”
The strategies by which the text might thus be
said to “loose the chain” that binds men and women
to the fixity of patriarchally conceived gender divisions (“a particular—but always unstable—
regime of sexual difference”) take an alternative
form at lines: if Lancelot is “feminized” by refrain
(and rhyme) the Lady is here analogously “masculinized” by the simile which likens her to “some
bold seër in a trance / Seeing all his own mischance” (emphasis added), an effect underscored
by the transposition of an epithet previously applied to Lancelot (“bold”) to the visionary to whom
she is compared.
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In his essay-review of Tennyson’s first published volume of poetry, Hallam praises the poet
as one who (unlike Keats and Shelley) “comes before the public, unconnected with any political
party, or peculiar system of opinions.” But if the
notion of “coming before the public” creates a curiously prophetic identification between the poet of
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and the eponymous
heroine of “The Lady of Shalott” (originally published in 1832), the Lady in turn suggests herself
to be a figure for the politics—particularly the sexual politics—of the poem in which she is located.
Just as the Lady makes an enigmatic debut before
her public, “A gleaming shape she floated by, /
Dead-pale between the houses high, / Silent into
Camelot”, so Tennyson’s poem finds itself negotiating opposed political impulses—reaction and
subversion, the weaving and the unthreading of the
“web” of patriarchal ideology.
III
One of the most significant ways in which
“The Lady of Shalott” manifests its politically selfdivided stance toward the values of patriarchal ideology—colluding with and critiquing them at
once—is by means of what might be called a discourse of the gaze. For patriarchy the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” sexuality is articulated in terms of a difference between activity
and passivity. These differences are in turn rehearsed at the scopic level where the gaze—the act
of looking—is identified with a “masculine” (rather
than “necessarily male”) subject-position while
women come, as the silent and passive objects of
the gaze (and the “masculine” desire of which it is
the sign), to occupy the site of the “feminine” and
are as such denied the possibility of experiencing
themselves as actively desiring subjects.
Tennyson’s poem begins its reflections on the
gaze and the question of sexual power-relations to
which it gives rise in the opening stanza:
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
Though the “Gazing” described here appears
not to be gender-specific (it is collectively the practice of “people”), the poem nonetheless already
suggests that the relation between gaze and object
within its mythic realm is ordered in terms of a conventionally patriarchal logic, since the object of the
popular gaze is “where the lilies blow …/ The island of Shalott,” locus of the central—if obscure—
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female figure of the poem. The complementary
identification of the gaze with a “masculine” subject-position which this implies is made explicit in
the next stanza:
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
Displaced onto “Four gray walls, and four gray
towers” that “Overlook a space of flowers,” the
gaze begins to emerge as a form of phallic surveillance of the female subject (or object) for which
the “space of flowers” functions as a metonymy.
While the text thus appears to validate patriarchal structures by mapping the gaze/object relation in terms of an opposition between “masculine”
and “feminine,” it also subversively exposes the
ideologically constructed nature of the “feminine,”
thereby circumscribing the claims for mastery—
both erotic and epistemological—which men make
over women. While the action of Tennyson’s phallically gazing towers is to “Overlook” the field of
their vision in the sense of surveying it from a
higher position, they seem equally not to be allseeing, to “Overlook” being not only to survey but
also to fail to apprehend or recognize. The doubleness of the language of the poem shows the
“masculine” gaze to be in a significant sense a blind
or “castrated” one. The implication is that the way
in which men like to see women—viewing and representing them, for example, as “feminine” objects
of desire—is indistinguishable from a process of
not seeing them, imprisoning the female within a
set of culturally constructed images from which,
paradoxically, it will always already have escaped:
“woman,” as Julia Kristeva argues, constitutes
“something that cannot be represented, something
that is not said, something above and beyond
nomenclatures and ideologies.”
The question of the (non)representation of
women is quite literally posed by the lines already
cited from the third stanza of the poem:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
In the context of the blindness of the “masculine” gaze toward the female subject—which it typically chooses to see as a “feminine” object—the
Lady’s literal and particular failure to appear “at
the casement” constitutes the ironic symbol of the
generalized respect in which “woman,” in the Kristevan sense, can only appear, as opposed to being
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ever plainly manifest or knowable, either within the
space of representation for which the casement is
a figure or on the horizon of the patriarchal gaze
that frames her.
But if she is an unseen presence (as “woman”
for Kristeva is always effaced) Tennyson’s Lady is
crucially unseeing also, interdicted from assuming
the gaze, the “masculine” position of erotically desiring subject, by the threat of a “curse” which, like
her mirror indeed, “hangs before her all the year”:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
Though the Lady herself is ignorant of the nature of the curse, its meaning and raison d’être are
readily enough decipherable from the perspective
of the analysis in the poem of the workings of patriarchal ideology. For the Lady to appropriate the
gaze would be for her to effect the crossing of the
patriarchal gender line from “feminine” to “masculine” and so to precipitate, through an act of female self-empowerment, the “confusion” to which
the lines cited from The Princess refer and which
her own poem both adumbrates and symbolically
moves to oppose in causing the attempted transition from Shalott to Camelot to issue only in death,
product of the curse.
Under these conditions, indirectly imposed by
the anonymous “whisper,” the Lady must herself
mediate her gaze via the mirror:
And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot.
The mirror is not only the site of “shadows”
but also of light, that which bestows definition and
shape upon objects and, as Isobel Armstrong puts
it, “enables perception to occur.” It is precisely the
quality of light, as much as phallic power, with
which Lancelot is associated throughout the third
section of the poem—from the moment that the sun
flames upon his “brazen greaves” to the brilliant
crisis of his double reflection: “From the bank and
from the river, / He flashed into the crystal mirror.”
Thus constituted as a phallic figure of light,
Lancelot personifies the very processes of patriarchal ideology, whose labor frames and fashions
women (and men).
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Though these processes in part entail the positioning of women as silently “other,” passive objects to the “masculine” gaze, the poem, at lines
109–117, violently inverts these conditions:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott. (emphases added)
Appropriating the gaze, the Lady enters the position of the desiring subject and so enacts—at the
scopic level—the crossing from “feminine” to
“masculine” gender positions originally figured in
the projected foray from Shalott to Camelot. In this
respect her action not only results in cracking the
mirror literally, but also embodies an overturning
of that for which the mirror is the figure—the ideological status quo. But if the literal mirror is subsequently found to be magically mended in the fantasmatic shape of the Lady’s “glassy countenance,”
to what extent does the text duplicate this process
in terms of the mirror-as-figure? How comprehensive, in other words, are its attempts to salvage the
patriarchal gender images beyond which the iconoclasm of the Lady’s gaze momentarily advances
her?
Insofar as it equips her with a “glassy countenance” at all, it would seem that the intent of the
text, at the beginning of its fourth and final part, is
to restore the ideological mirror, since to “look to
Camelot” with eyes of glass is not to see at all and
for the Lady to become the precise opposite of what
she had previously fleetingly been—not subject but
object. Yet if she is thus objectified (and the continuity of the text with patriarchal values therefore
reasserted) the Lady nonetheless retains a glimmer
of transformative potential, being, at least until “her
eyes [are] darkened wholly”, an object of a particular kind—a looking-glass in fact, a mirror. As
such, the Lady constitutes a reflective surface by
dint of which the one who gazes into it (Lancelot)
may behold himself in the act of seeing. In this respect she might be said to possess the capacity for
inducing in the “masculine” gaze a certain selfconsciousness as to its own strategies, a recognition of its own blindness with regard to the female
subject and female sexuality and of the truth that
the way in which men traditionally view women is
critically discrepant from how women see themselves.
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To the degree that it contains the elements of
a critique of patriarchal ideology, “The Lady of
Shalott” seeks, equally, to bring about—for the
(male) Victorian reader for whom Lancelot is surrogate—just such an altered vision of the relations
between men and women. Within the myth within
the text, however, the revolutionary moment is
badly missed:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, ‘She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.’
Though Lancelot reflects “a little space,” perhaps briefly speculating upon the possibility of
seeing women other than patriarchally, he evidently does not reflect long enough, going on to
re-articulate, with “‘She has a lovely face,’” the
orthodox perception of women as the object of the
“masculine” gaze.
From this vantage it appears that the lazy blessing Lancelot confers upon the Lady at the conclusion of the poem is no better than a disguised version of the curse drawn into operation at the end
of the third part of the poem, since the latter is elaborated precisely in terms of her transportation back
across the gender line, from “masculine” to “feminine” positions, subject to object of the gaze,
“Who” to “what”:
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right—
The leaves upon her falling light—
Through the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot.
No longer the bold “see-er” she once had been,
the Lady’s course is emphatically re-assimilated to
the criteria of the “femininity” she had previously
violated—even “her blood,” at line 147, is “frozen
slowly,” in a detail which suggests, amid this poem
of moons and curses, a repression of menstruation
as “unfeminine.” “Lying, robed in snowy white,”
she becomes the very bride—submissive and virginal, desired not desiring—whose image had traversed her mirror to such equivocal effect at the
end of the second section of the poem.
But if this passage seems to avenge female
self-empowerment it goes on to counter its own actions. Recollecting lines 64–72, in which the socially symbolic rituals of marriage and death are
arbitrarily juxtaposed, the text now transforms the
one into the other: groom Lancelot, whose “bridle
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bells” not only ring, but also merrily pun at line 85
(“bridle”/“bridal”) becomes a reaper, the lady her
own elegist:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.
Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turned to towered Camelot.
In the context of the crossing from Shalott to
Camelot, the supervention of death betokens, as we
have seen, the reactionary orientation of the text,
its resistance to the very questioning of the forms
of patriarchal ideology which it seeks, conversely,
to provoke at other levels. Yet the fact that the trajectory of death is at this point conflated with that
of marriage has the effect of redefining—indeed reversing—the value of death-as-sign within the
economy of the sexual politics of the poem. As a
figure for marriage, death comes, that is, to re-open
the ideologically dissentient potential of the poem
by suggesting that marriage, far from entailing the
fulfillment of each sex through the other (as in The
Princess) is tantamount, for women, to a form of
self-annihilation.
As a response to the questions which it raises,
“The Lady of Shalott” proves itself, in the language
of In Memoriam, to be “A contradiction on the
tongue” from first to last, simultaneously affirming
and displacing those patriarchal visions of women
and the relations between the sexes which held
sway throughout the Victorian period and which
are still today predominant. Thus exhibiting a sexual politics which is continually at odds with itself—being neither reactionary nor radical but both
at once—Tennyson’s poem emerges as no less centrally fractured, or “cracked from side to side,”
than the mirror within it, precisely unsure in fact
as to quite which side of its own covert political
and socio-sexual debate it is on—that of patriarchy
and reaction or women and subversion.
Source: Carl Plasa, “‘Cracked from Side to Side’: Sexual
Politics in ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” in Victorian Poetry, Vol.
30, Nos. 3–4, Autumn-Winter 1992, pp. 247–61.
Ann C. Colley
In the following essay, Colley explores Tennyson’s attempts to move the poem and the reader
past the familiar into an undefined realm.
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
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Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And round the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
The questions “Who is this and what is here?” that
the fearful, dull-witted knights, burghers, lords,
and ladies are left pondering are those questions
which gaze back at the readers of “The Lady of
Shalott” long after its fluent lines have drifted away
from the closing of the poem. They place the almost unsuspecting audience among the citizens of
Camelot, looking at the inscribed name and wondering what to do with it: Who is the Lady of
Shalott, and what is the meaning of her presence
in Camelot? These questions and the accompanying unease of possibly being identified among the
citizens tempt the reader to separate himself from
the curious and unknowing crowd, leave the wharf,
and step into the Lady of Shalott’s boat—as if to
take her part. In this shift, he moves to an understanding, a reading, the impulses of which are similar to those that press the Lady through the poem
from the tower, to the river, to Camelot. These impulses reflect the movement from the doubly enclosed, piecemeal images visible from the tower to
the more continuous and definite vision of the last
section of the poem. There is a desire within the
reader to move from a fragmented and metonymic
space to a metaphoric landscape in which the Lady
becomes continuous with her surroundings. But the
metaphoric vision eventually destroys itself and
dies with the Lady. In the end, this destruction
places the reader closer to Tennyson’s dilemma,
his difficulty in leaving the world and passing into
a “Nameless,” shadow-less realm.
To understand the reader’s desire to insert himself into a metaphoric relationship with the poem
and to comprehend his ultimate undoing, we need
to consider the Lady of Shalott’s unfolding, for in
many ways the two movements are analogous. In
the beginning of “The Lady of Shalott,” images
come and disappear as pieces and shadows of the
world proceed through the Lady’s mirror. Between
these abbreviated images are spaces which syncopate the continuous weaving motion—the winding
of the river and the road, the coming and going of
the people—that tries to hold the lines of the poem
together. These intervals frustrate the almost mechanical advance of the procession, and throughout the early parts of the poem, come to be more
visible and compelling than the images, especially
when Tennyson marks them in time and in synecdochic forms. For instance, it is only “Sometimes”
or at particular times of the day (“when the moon
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They stand powerless
to follow the metaphoric
impulse and pass into the
‘Nameless’ and leave
images, names, and words,
the ‘shadows of a shadowworld,’ behind. They cannot
die with the Lady.”
was overhead” that the market girls, the village
churls, a shepherd boy, a long-haired page, a knight
or two, a funeral, and “two young lovers lately
wed” enter and exit from the domain of the mirror.
And, when they do, it is the pieces of these images
which have separated themselves out that impress
the eye and engage the gaze of the Lady. In her
passive way, she sees only parts: the red cloaks of
the market girls, the curly hair of the shepherd lad,
the long hair of the page, and the plumes and lights
of the funeral procession. These glide singly and
separately through her mirror like the individual
pulses of the shuttle sliding through the warp.
Surrounding the tower, pieces neither reaching
nor touching one another accent the spaces between
images. The tower overlooks “a space of flowers.”
The reader, though, does not have to wait until the
second stanza to experience these spaces, for immediately in the opening lines, Tennyson plunges
him into a gap which divides the fields and allows
him to see that “On either side the river lie / Long
fields of barley and of rye,” and involves him in
the Lady’s initial view of a world dominated by
separateness and without promise of continuity and
wholeness. There is little sense of a mutual dependency, a dialectic of opposites, between the whole
and the part. One does not take life from the other.
Rather the pieces dislocate the continuity and create a landscape in which there are openings and discontinuities. The fields which are “Long” and
“meet the sky” would extend without a break if the
river and the road travelling through and dividing
them did not interfere. The water itself would flow
“for ever” if “Little breezes” did not cut into the
waves and create patches of movement. These
synecdochic images must necessarily admit beginnings and endings, so a “margin, willow-veiled”
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borders and cuts off the river from all that surrounds it; water must separate the Lady, the tower,
and the island from the fields. In this land of pieces
a shallop skims by and disappears, and the Lady’s
voice, isolated from her, leaves the tower and
comes surrounded by space and silence to the
reapers below. The sounds render her presence by
echoing her just as the mirror reflects.
In the early verses the vision is metonymic as
well as synecdochic, for these single images are always succeeding one another. They do not flow
into one another; rather they live for a moment until they are replaced by others—as soon as the shepherd-lad exits, the damsels arrive to occupy the
space he had temporarily filled. The verses proceed
as a procession. Without succession the cloth of the
poem cannot hold. It is as if there were an attempt
to weave a poem, though with broken lines and
threads. If the Lady of Shalott does not constantly
replace one image or thread with another, the tapestry and the poem must fly apart, as the tapestry
does.
This synecdochic and metonymic vision is no
different when Sir Lancelot enters in Part III. If
anything his coming intensifies all that has passed
before, for like his double reflection, his presence
exaggerates this disjunction of a world dominated
by parts and motivated by replacement. Even more
distant from the land than the Lady in the tower,
Lancelot and the rays of images shining from him
seem to dangle and dazzle in open space (“The
gemmy bridle glittered free”; “A mighty silver bugle” hangs from his “blazoned baldric”), and like
an arrow released from the bow, Lancelot himself
flashes by, cut off from all about him (“Some
bearded meteor” moving “over still Shalott”). Tennyson’s description of Lancelot, however, concentrates not only upon the successive and separated
parts of his armor but also upon his movements
with which, like the road and the river, he cuts
through the fields (“He rode between the barleysheaves”) and divides the landscape. The effect of
his action, though, is quite different from that of
the road or the river, for Lancelot’s brightness when
coupled with the sun’s brilliance (“The sun came
dazzling through the leaves”) seems paradoxically
both to expand and fill the gaps of his passage. His
glistening presence wounds the fields, yet simultaneously fills and heals the scar. One rapid, brilliant
piece blends with another and for an instant the collective aura overwhelms all boundaries and divisions: “The helmet and the helmet-feather / Burned
like one burning flame together.” When Tennyson
compares the knight’s brilliance to a meteor that is
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“trailing light”, these blended pieces even seem to
melt away the frame of the mirror. Now continuity and wholeness seem as possible as the promise
of eternal faithfulness depicted on Lancelot’s shield
(the knight “for ever” kneeling “To a lady.” That
momentary presence pushes the Lady from her
loom, her mirror, from her synecdochic and
metonymic space, and urges her and the poem forward.
Once the Lady’s perspective shifts, so does the
landscape. In the first three parts, images move horizontally across her static, vertical world; now, because she turns away and comes down, she moves
horizontally through static, vertical structures. With
that change come other inversions: instead of passively watching images move through her mirror,
she becomes the image which passes through. Over
becomes under as she glides into towered Camelot
“Under tower and balcony.” Echoes swell to full
sounds; the fairy name takes on form and becomes
the inscribed name; once empty skies and placid
river swell with the rain. Action, fullness, and inscription replace passivity, emptiness, echoes,
whispers, and rumour. The Lady emerges as a
Lancelot: she gleams, she reflects, she is the one
who is paradoxically to cut through and to remind
the onlookers of the absence of wholeness, but she
does it in a different manner. Of course, the analogy cannot be exact, for Lancelot’s initial dazzling,
doubly-reflected presence brings at best a promise
and at worst an illusion of the Lady’s metaphoric
vision. At the end he is not in the Lady’s vessel but
somewhere apart by “a little space” from both her
and the citizens. His isolation, his continuing the
creation of spaces between images, suggests that
there is something hypocritical, even Satanic, about
him. This hint of evil is not, as some would have
it, because he is indifferent to the Lady but because
he has knowledge of her and her metaphoric vision
which he chooses to avoid. It is as if in remaining
apart on the wharf, he stood beside Tennyson who
could never quite let himself completely enter the
Lady’s vessel even though the impulse toward the
mystical and non-representational was strong
within him.
The Lady is different from Lancelot because
when she leaves the tower, inscribes her name on
the prow of the boat, and floats down the river to
Camelot, she turns her back on the vision of her
past and inserts herself into a metaphoric relationship with her surroundings and her self. With this
shift, she moves into the spaces between the fields
and the people and fills them with her form: her
name and her body. No longer is there a silence be-
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tween her name and her body, a pause between her
singing and the audible echoes. The true weaving
and mingling of threads of experience take place,
so that vertical and horizontal structures merge. The
static tower blends with the moving, horizontal
boat. When the Lady is in the boat that moves
through the gaps between the fields, she closes the
spaces, as her voice and her body spill over into
the landscape, and, in turn, that landscape bends to
meet her. Her white robe “loosely” flies “to left and
right” and the leaves from the willows lining the
bank fall lightly upon that robe. The sky reaches
the earth; the inside, the outside; and together they
eradicate the “as if” of the previous separateness.
This separateness, dependent upon gaps, makes
everything into an “as if”; but in Part IV there is
rarely a gap between the image and its context. Tennyson relies little on simile. In fact, in revising the
1832 version of the poem he chooses to rid the lines
of similes. The Lady herself becomes a metaphor.
She is not “like” a brilliant meteor but is “A gleaming shape.” With her “glassy countenance” she becomes both mirror, seer, and object.
As in the metaphoric landscape described
above there is a yoking, a glissement, rather than
an interrupting. Now it is the Lady who catches
the others’ gaze. It is she, not Lancelot, whom the
people view and through whom they recognize the
limitations of their own vision. When the citizens
of Camelot regard her, understandably they are
fearful because they fear to see a reflection of their
own lack and emptiness. Although her name appears upon her boat, and her body is as an image,
her coming tells of a world which does not have
to depend upon image and name. As their questions reveal, the citizens are dependent upon such
tangible tokens and are trapped, as the Lady once
was, in a landscape of successive, unconnected
images framed by “who” and “what.” Theirs is not
a place to admit transcendence or a unifying vision. The Lady’s, however, is: Edgar F. Shannon,
Jr., is correct—the Lady has moved to “insight.”
But that insight does not have to be regarded in
a Christian mystical context, for her movement
is not necessarily to a vision which exists beyond the image. Rather it is a journey to a preimagistic understanding which negates image and
recaptures a condition that does not require representation. In her recovery of a pre-imagistic
state, she participates in the metaphoric impulse,
for, even though metaphor begins in the concrete
and seems initially to depend upon the conjunction of representations, the tension between that
yoking scatters the objects and discards them, and
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seems finally to strain to retrieve a knowledge
which is not at all linked to representation. The
metaphor seems to wish to forget image. It is,
therefore, understandable that in the poem, all that
remains for the citizens is that scattering—her
dead body and her inscribed name.
When the Lady inserts herself into the spaces
of the landscape and thereby acknowledges the possibility for continuity and similarity in experience,
she also places herself within a context which recognizes differences and otherness. As metaphor
teaches, similarity is impossible without difference.
The Lady’s act of writing her name is an important
aspect of her involvement with metaphor. It is as
if the name were an abbreviated metaphor. The
written name brings with it hopes of continuity because it is a fixed designator; it also admits differences because the very act of naming acknowledges
the presence of the Other and the necessity for that
presence to break away from a metonymic relationship with her parent, the land of Shalott (she is,
after all, the Lady of Shalott), and create her own
identity.
In the early parts of the poem, the Lady’s name
seems indefinite, some arbitrary identifier imposed
on her by the reapers. She is neither conscious of
her name nor desirous to use it. She has “little care.”
It is only when she leaves the tower that she cares.
Then by taking on the name (baptising herself if
you like) and inscribing it on the very vessel of her
mediation into her surroundings, she goes to
Camelot. (It is interesting to note that when Tennyson revised the 1832 version of the poem, he
moved the name forward from the stern of the boat
to the prow.) This inscribed name, the mediator,
becomes a mirror through which she can see and
present herself as being distinct from others and allow them to discover how they in their imagisticdependent world are different from her. It also becomes a means by which she, as Tennyson did on
occasion when he would repeat his name to reach
a higher plane, can separate herself from a world
ironically enslaved to naming objects.
However, because she does write her name,
death and wounding are also inevitable. On the one
hand she escapes the limits of metonymy, but on
the other hand she faces the experience of loss, for
naming is also a form of mourning, like the mournful carol she sings at the end. To name is to experience closure. It is as Claude Lévi-Strauss writes,
“as far as one can go.” Naming involves death also
because it aspires to the ultimate, to fix the margin. However, in attempting to fix the margin the
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name grows more conscious of the absence of the
ultimate, that is of the difference between the fixed
reference and the idea. As Walter Benjamin suggests, names are the incomplete and inadequate
mirrors of meaning. They are the fact of knowledge; not knowledge itself. Names name the death
of oneness and are dependent upon representation.
Because there is a sense of loss accompanying
naming, when the Lady of Shalott asserts her name
into the consciousness of Camelot, she wounds and
ruptures the synecdochic order of the dull-witted
society and exposes its emptiness. When the citizens gaze at her name, they feel an absence to
which their only responses are questions tying them
more tightly to their dependency upon representation and pulling them further away from the presence of the Lady’s metaphoric vision, a vision
which could heal the wounding of their consciousness by her name. Theirs is not a place from which
they can travel beyond the rupturing of consciousness into the salvation of metaphor.
The citizens on shore cannot participate in the
Lady’s metaphoric world; consequently, they also
cannot go where metaphor leads and follow her into
the final stage of her journey—her death and the
death of metaphor. Just as she reaches “The first
house by the water-side”, her blood freezes, her
eyes darken “wholly,” and her singing ends. With
her death and the coming of darkness and silence,
she moves into a realm where the elements—light,
time, space, and place—which form and bind
words, sounds, and images are neither present nor
absent. Perhaps beyond the audible reverberations
of the poem, her death takes her where metaphor
reaches and reclaims what metaphor paradoxically
aspires to grasp, but cannot: a state not linked to
representation—hence, a state previous to itself, an
accomplishment which ironically causes the death
of metaphor by foreclosing its characteristic impulse which is a desire to undo itself as well as others’ desire for it.
In the end, then, the Lady is relieved of the
burden of the metaphoric impulse to reach for what
it cannot grasp, a burden which stares back at those
left on shore. While the citizens stand gaping, struggling with their limitations and their dependency
upon image and name, she enters a nameless, imageless realm which exists prior to the assumption
of metaphor, name or the “symbolic.” But now that
there is a glimmer, a suggestion, of that realm, her
presence for others is more than the challenge of
her metaphoric vision; it is also a reminder of the
pre-symbolic, raw state which because of its very
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nature resists and irritates metaphor and increases
its burden. Her death, therefore, offers a strange reversal, for it reveals vividly the limitations of the
representational world, even those of that world’s
most integrative act—the metaphor—an act which
when well done undoes itself. Her death frustrates
whatever impulses there might have been for others to leave the metonymic space behind, recover
and participate in the metaphoric, and, thereby, heal
their wounded consciousness.
The Lady’s journey to a metaphoric landscape
and her release from that burden is important in itself, but it also needs to be reconsidered briefly in
terms of the reader’s movement through the poem.
When the reader first encounters the poem he is
separated from it, imprisoned in his own tower into
which flash words, phrases, sounds, rhythms, and
rhymes. These succeed each other as he moves
from line to line—forgetting, losing, and replacing.
He waits for some word, some rhythm, some figure of sound to catch and hold him and remind him,
like the picture of eternal reverence on Lancelot’s
shield, that there is something which unites the
spaces between images and words. Eventually the
reader inserts himself into these spaces and, like
the Lady of Shalott, becomes more aware of both
the differences and similarities working with and
against each other. Once he has entered the
metaphoric relationship with the poem, the reader’s
impulse is to sustain that relationship and find salvation in its integrating act. But this impulse involves bearing the burden and treachery of
metaphor.
If in becoming the agent for metaphor, the
reader attempts not only to integrate one image,
space, and word with others and create some sense
of wholeness, but also to follow the desire of the
metaphor to reach a pre-imagistic or pre-symbolic
state, the reader courts his own undoing and discomfort, and faces his own duplicity. The reader
tempts disaster, for at the moment of integration
when there appears to be an understanding of the
text, a feeling of reaching the “truth,” the metaphor
pushes on. Momentarily it goes where its impulses
take it and bursts open to expose a prior, raw, nonrepresentational “truth.” That revelation (the death
of the metaphor) destroys the promise of salvation
which the reader thought he had found in
metaphor. Now he is caught between image and
non-image, between the symbolic and the raw, in
a space between areas for which there is no integrating act. No longer can he rest; he has been
trapped by the very act which supported him. In
the end, he stands between the citizens and the
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Lady, belonging to neither world. Frustrated, the
reader joins Lancelot and, perhaps, Tennyson on
the wharf. Together poet and reader momentarily
resemble and anticipate the doubters in “The Ancient Sage” (1885) who, in metonymic time measured by “ ‘Thens’ ” and “ ‘Whens,’ ” “creep from
thought to thought.” They stand powerless to follow the metaphoric impulse and pass into the
“Nameless” and leave images, names, and words,
the “shadows of a shadow-world,” behind. They
cannot die with the Lady. Neither can they be the
ancient sage who, when he sits alone, “revolving
in” himself, finds:
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven.
“The Lady of Shalott” is a poem that acknowledges the poet’s and the reader’s dilemma.
It is as if Tennyson were attempting to use the
poem as a vessel to rescue himself and his reader
from an enclosed and image-bound landscape and
move into a recognition of the non-representational. But, as much as he repeats the Lady’s name,
allows the sounds of the refrain to resound, and,
in the manner of the ancient sage, lets the poem
revolve in itself, he cannot push the poem into a
“Nameless” state. The poem, like the Lady’s boat,
remains to stare back and remind Tennyson and
the reader of their bondage to “mortal limits”—
rhyme and words. Like the swallow on the lake
“That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there”, the
most that the poem, Tennyson, and the reader can
do is dip “into the abysm” beneath the rhyming
shadow world.
It is difficult to refrain from reconsidering Tennyson’s conclusion from the point of view of a later
poet who entered the same lists, but attempted to
achieve another outcome. In “Sunday Morning”
Wallace Stevens acknowledges our dependency on
detail (the “old dependency of day and night”), yet
suggests that it is those very fleeting particulars
which consummate our “dreams” and “desires.” As
for death, it is in fact death itself that engenders
meaning (“Death is the mother of beauty,”). If
Stevens is right, the poet and reader do not in the
end have to fear “the immense disorder of truths”
(“Connoisseur of Chaos”), but can stand beside that
“pensive man” who is the “connoisseur of Chaos,”
and see “that eagle float / For which the intricate
Alps are a single nest.”
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Source: Ann C. Colley, “The Quest for the ‘Nameless’ in
Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” in Victorian Poetry,
Vol. 23, No. 3, Autumn 1985, pp. 369–78.
Sources
Jump, John D., Tennyson: “In Memoriam,” “Maud,” and
Other Poems, J. A. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1974, pp. vii–xx.
Noyes, Arthur, “Tennyson and Some Recent Critics,” in
Some Aspects of Modern Poetry, Hodder & Stoughton.,
1924, pp. 133–76.
Saintsbury, George, “Tennyson,” in Corrected Impressions:
Essays on Victorian Writers, Dodd Mead & Company, pp.
21–30.
Shaw, W. David, “Rites of Passage: ‘The Lady of Shalott’
and ‘The Lotus-Eaters,’” in Tennyson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elizabeth A. Francis, Prentice-Hall,
1980, pp. 19–27.
Whitman, Walt, “A Word about Tennyson,” in Critic (New
York), Vol. 10, January 1887, pp. 1–2.
Further Reading
Amis, Kingsley, Introduction to Tennyson, Penguin Books,
1973, pp. 7–19.
Students who find scholarly work hard to follow will
appreciate Amis’s brief examination of Tennyson’s
life and importance. Amis, who could be one of the
funniest novelists of the twentieth century, seems an
unlikely choice for introducing Tennyson’s poetry,
but his essay is reverent and warm.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, Tennyson: The Growth of a
Poet, Harvard University Press, 1960.
Part biography and part criticism, this book gives
some insight into Tennyson’s psychological state as
he wrote this poem.
Foakes, R. A., “The Commitment to Metaphor: Modern Criticism and Romantic Poetry,” in British Romantic Poets: Recent Revelations, New York University Press, 1966, pp.
22–32.
Foakes does not specifically talk about Tennyson, but
he does talk about how Romanticism affected poetry
that came after it. Readers can draw conclusions
about where Tennyson fits into the scheme Foakes
proposes.
Hollander, John, “Tennyson’s Melody,” in Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers,
1985, pp. 103–26.
Hollander’s examination of the sound of Tennyson’s
poems, including “The Lady of Shalott,” is rich and
full of details.
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The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
1893
First published in the collection The Rose in 1893,
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is an example of
Yeats’s earlier lyric poems. Throughout the three
short quatrains the poem explores the speaker’s
longing for the peace and tranquility of his boyhood haunt, Innisfree.
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” suggests that a life
of simplicity in nature will bring peace to the troubled speaker. However, the poem is the speaker’s
recollection of Innisfree, and therefore the journey
is an emotional and spiritual escape rather than an
actual one. Innisfree may be a symbol for the
speaker’s passed youth, which the speaker is unable to return to in the “real,” or physical, world.
Emotionally, the speaker can return again and again
to the tranquility of Innisfree.
Author Biography
Born June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Ireland, to
John Butler Yeats, a lawyer turned portrait painter,
and Susan Mary Pollexfen, daughter of a well-todo shipping family, William Butler Yeats was raised
in London and Dublin, attending schools in both
cities. Though passionate about art, Yeats turned to
writing after reading Irish poets Samuel Ferguson
and James Clarence Mangan. His own interest in all
things Irish can be seen in poems such as his popular and early poem,“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,”
in which he expresses his longing to return to
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The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894); Cathleen ni
Houlihan (1902); The King’s Threshold (1904);
and Deirdre (1907). His poetry collections include
The Wanderings of Oisin (1889); The Celtic Twilight (1893); The Wind Among the Reeds (1899);
The Wild Swans at Coole (1917); and The Tower
(1928). Yeats was elected to a seat in the Irish Free
Senate in 1922 and awarded the Nobel Prize in
1923. He died January 29, 1939, in Roquebrune,
France. In 1948, his remains were re-interred in
Drumcliff, Sligo. He is widely considered one of
the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
Poem Text
William Butler Yeats
County Sligo in western Ireland, where he spent
much of his youth. Yeats’s chief influences included
his father; John O’Leary (1830–1907), an Irish nationalist and activist; and Maud Gonne, a fiery Irish
revolutionary with whom the poet fell in love and
maintained a long correspondence. Yeats celebrated
Gonne’s beauty in verse and plays throughout his
life, though the two never married. A writer who
was inspired by mysticism and occult philosophy as
much as Irish literature and folklore, Yeats was
deeply involved in organizations such as the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society, the latter founded by Madam
Blavatsky, a controversial mystic. A lifelong student of philosophy and literature, Yeats was well
read in writers such as Plato, Dante, Shakespeare,
Ben Johnson, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, William
Blake, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
A shy youth, Yeats grew into a charismatic figure, championing Irish heritage and resisting the
cultural influence of English rule. A playwright as
well as a poet, Yeats, along with a patron, Lady
Gregory of Coole Park, founded the Irish Theatre,
which became the Abbey Theatre. He served as the
Abbey’s lead playwright and later was joined by
John Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western
World. Many of Yeats’s plays drew on Irish legends and include The Countess Cathleen (1892);
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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles
made:
Nine bean-rows I will have there, a hive for the
honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace
comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where
the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple
glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day.
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the
shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements
grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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Poem Summary
Line 1
In this line Yeats establishes the opening tone
as well as the refrain of the poem. The poem focuses on Innisfree as a place of escape for the
speaker.
Lines 2–4
Here the speaker describes Innisfree as a simple, natural environment where he will build a
cabin and live alone. Note the rich description in
these lines. The language is specific. The speaker
does not merely mention that he will build a cabin,
but also that it will be made of “clay and wattles.”
The speaker also specifies that he will have “nine
bean-rows,” instead of simply a “garden.” These
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Media
Adaptations
• As part of their Caedmon Treasury of Poets,
Harper Audio has published an audiocassette of
poets reading their own poems. Poets include e.
e. cummings, W. H. Auden, and Yeats reading
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The tape is 155
minutes in length.
• Yeats reads “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and
“Song of the Old Mother” on In Their Own
Voices (1996), on the Rhino Word Beat label.
• Judy Collins sings “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
on her 1971 album Judy Collins: Living. Hamilton Camp wrote the music for the song.
• John Aschenbrenner’s song cycle To an Isle in
the Water (1998) comprises settings of Yeats’s
poems including “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
The album is published by Isle Enterprises.
• In the video The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
actors Stephanie Beacham, Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Minnie Driver and others read
Yeats’s poems and discuss his life.
• The Yeats Society of New York, online at
http://www.yeatssociety.org/yeatsny.html, contains a wealth of information about the poet and
links to other Yeats sites on the web.
• In 1953, Audio-Forum released an audiocassette
of poet Stephen Spender reading Yeats’s poems.
The title is W. B. Yeats. The tape can be purchased from Jeffrey Norton Publishers, 96
Broad St., Guilford, CT 06437.
• The video Yeats Country (1965) juxtaposes
Yeats’s poetry with scenes of the Ireland he
wrote about. It is distributed by International
Film Bureau.
• Insight Video distributes the documentary Yeats
Remembered, a biographical film using period
photographs and interviews with the poet and
his family. It can be purchased from Insight Media, 2162 Broadway, NY, NY 10024.
are images that conjure up in the mind of the reader
concrete visual features of Yeats’s poetic fantasy.
Notice also the particularly interesting image of the
“bee-loud glade.” This image invests Innisfree with
a magical air.
Lines 5–6
In these lines Yeats introduces the connection
between peace and Innisfree in the speaker’s mind.
The first line of the second stanza repeats the same
meter employed in the first line of the first stanza.
The reader can sense a refrain developing. The line
“And I shall have some peace there, for peace
comes dropping slow” is composed almost entirely
of iambic feet. This means that one unaccented syllable is followed by an accented syllable. The
iambs are interrupted in the middle of the line by
an amphibrach with the phrase “some peace there.”
An amphibrach is composed of two unaccented syllables sandwiching an accented one. It is used for
emphasis. The amphibraic foot in the fifth line corresponds with the similar foot in the first line. This
may be used to emphasize the metaphor that Innisfree represents escape for the speaker. Line six
contains a good example of figurative language.
Yeats wants to explain that the abstract idea of
“peace” is abundant from morning until night in Innisfree, but instead of relying on that cliche, he
transforms morning into the image of veils from
which peace falls. Night has also been transformed
into “where the cricket sings.”
Lines 7–8
Here Yeats continues with transforming midnight and noon into almost eerie images. Evening
becomes a dark image of the sky filled with the
wings of birds.
Lines 9–12
In the last lines of the poem, the speaker stands
in the street surrounded by gray pavement. This image, which is hard and silent, contrasts with the
soothing, soft image of the water. The speaker continues to hear the sounds of nature even in the city.
The peace of Innisfree is able to transcend the urban environment because it resides in a completely
natural one, that of the speaker himself.
Themes
Nature
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” expresses the idea
that nature provides an inherently restorative place
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to which human beings can go to escape the chaos
and corrupting influences of civilization. In his autobiography, Yeats writes that his poem was influenced by his reading of American writer Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which describes
Thoreau’s experiment of living alone in a small hut
in the woods on Walden Pond, outside Concord,
Massachusetts. Thoreau lived in his one-room
house from 1845–1847, gardening, writing, and
studying natural history. Thoreau championed the
solitary, self-sufficient life lived in harmony with
nature, considering it more authentic than a life
spent balancing ledgers or working for someone
else. He disdained the ways working for a living
and acquiring material goods can control one’s life.
Explaining his motivation for the experiment,
Thoreau writes in Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I
did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it
was quite necessary.
Yeats also expresses this sentiment when he
writes of building a small cabin “of clay and wattles” and living alone “in the bee-loud glade” of Innisfree. Yeats seems to refer to Walden when he
writes of the “Nine bean-rows I will have there,”
and he underscores the contrast between rural and
urban lifestyle in the last lines, when he places himself “on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.”
Both of these images symbolize the destructive,
joy-deadening forces of modern life. Yeats emphasizes the authenticity of the desire to live close
to nature, writing that he hears the call to go to
Innisfree “in the heart’s deep core.”
Imagination
A primary feature of Romantic poetry is the
idea of the imagination as a faculty that can generate alternate realities. The speaker of “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree” exercises this faculty by daydreaming about life in the country. The entire poem
describes a life that he “will” live, not one he is
currently living. The detail of his fantasy suggests
that the speaker has entertained this desire previously. Readers can clearly picture the haven the
speaker imagines. He enumerates the bean-rows he
will have, describes the building materials of his
cabin, and lists particular creatures he will hear, i.e.,
bees, crickets, linnets.
Ever since William Wordsworth’s lyric poems
about nature’s beauty and power helped define Ro-
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Parodies are imitations of another work, written
to deflate the subject matter of the original. Read
Ezra Pound’s poem “The Lake Isle,” then write
an essay explaining what his poem says about
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
• Write a detailed description of the place you
would most like to call home, both the geographical location (e.g., New York City, French
Riviera, etc.) and the kind of structure (e.g., a
palace, a log cabin, a hut, etc.). What are the
qualities of the home? What do these qualities
say about your own values?
• Get together with your classmates and brainstorm ideas for your ideal house. If possible,
sketch a floor plan. How does your idea of an
ideal home differ from those of your classmates?
• What are some of the sights, smells, sounds that
remind you of pleasant experiences in your life?
When do they occur, and how do you respond
when you encounter them?
• Yeats’s poem was influenced by his reading of
Thoreau’s Walden. Make a list of books that
have most influenced your own way of thinking, then write a short essay explaining how they
have done so.
• Poll your classmates, asking them what place
they most remember from childhood. Then categorize their responses. What do these places
have in common? Why are they memorable?
What does this tell you about your relationship
to childhood?
mantic verse, poets have used their imaginations to
conjure worlds in which they would be more content and where their “true” selves could find peace.
But for Yeats, this imagined world remained a fantasy: unlike Thoreau, Yeats never lived the rural
life. Rather, he was an urban man of letters, an Irish
senator, and a Nobel laureate. Moreover, his later
poems never exhibited the degree or kind of romanticism shown in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
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Nostalgia
Less than a hundred years before Yeats penned
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” William Wordsworth
wrote in a sonnet that “the world is too much with
us,” meaning that the human mind and heart are
too preoccupied by the material or worldly seductions of urban living. Yeats experienced the urge
to return to a simpler, more familiar life as a kind
of homesickness which expressed itself as a desire
to “return” to Innisfree, a small island at the eastern end of Lough Gill in County Sligo. The poet
regularly visited Sligo while growing up, and the
inspiration for the poem came when Yeats was living in London and walking Fleet Street, a busy
commercial section of the city. The sound of a
fountain’s water reminded him of the Sligo lake,
and the poem was born. Two other early poems by
Yeats which deal with nostalgia and escape are
“The Stolen Child” and “To an Isle in the Water.”
Style
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is written with an abab
rhyme scheme corresponding to each of the three
quatrains in the poem, which are defined as a stanza
composed of four lines which may or may not have
a set line length. Also prevalent is the use of alliteration and assonance, both of which emphasize the
musical tone and rhythm of the piece.
When a stanza in a poem has a pattern of
rhymes it is called a “rhyme scheme.” “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree” utilizes end rhyme in an abab
rhyme scheme. This means that the end of the first
line of a stanza rhymes with the end of the third
line, and the end of the second line of a stanza
rhymes with the end of the fourth line. All three of
the quatrains in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” display an abab rhyme scheme.
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” uses “alliteration”
and “assonance” to emphasize the sound and mood
of the poem. Alliteration is the repetition of certain
consonants in a poem which are often used in order to stress a word or phrase. Notice the sound of
the consonants ‘l’ and ‘s’ in the following line:
“I hear lake water lapping with the low sounds
by the shore.” Read the line aloud and notice the
emphasis on the words “lapping,” “low,” and
“shore.” Assonance occurs when the vowel sounds
attached to different consonants are repeated in a
poem. Notice the sound of the vowels ‘i’ and ‘o’
in the following line:
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“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.”
Assonance is less clear than either rhyme or alliteration, but its use is similar. It links important
words or phrases in the poem together.
Historical Context
In the 1880s, when Yeats wrote “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree,” Ireland was in economic and political
turmoil, and Yeats and his family were struggling
financially. It is not surprising that the sound of a
water fountain on a bustling London street would
remind him of the lapping water of Lough Gill and
stir the boyhood dream he had of living on Innisfree, unencumbered by the demands of modern urban life.
Ireland was an agricultural country in the nineteenth century, but British landlords controlled
many farms. Farmers had fought for almost three
centuries for greater say in their livelihood. In the
1880s, they finally achieved some success. The
leader for Irish land reform and Home Rule (i.e., a
subordinate parliament for Ireland) was Charles
Steward Parnell (1846–1891), often referred to as
the “uncrowned King of Ireland.” Parnell, a
wealthy Protestant landlord who empathized with
the plight of the Irish, was elected to Parliament in
1875 and became head of the Irish Party.
With the backing of Parnell, along with
Catholic labor activist Michael Davitt (1846–
1906), liberal British Prime Minister Gladstone enacted the Land Act of 1881, which guaranteed tenant farmers fair rent, protection against eviction,
and the freedom to sell or transfer the lease on their
farm. Parliament also passed a “franchise act,”
adding some 500,000 new voters to the rolls, most
of whom were middle-class and poor Catholics
who supported Parnell. Still, a Home Rule Bill was
defeated in Commons in 1886, and in 1890, Parnell was disgraced when a court revealed he had
been “living in sin” with the wife of William Henry
O’Shea, a politician and fellow member of the Irish
Party.
A second Home Rule Bill was introduced in
1893 but also defeated, this time in the House of
Lords. After this defeat, many Irish nationalists,
such as Yeats, turned their attention to developing
a greater sense of Ireland’s contributions to culture
and the arts. For example, Douglas Hyde, who later
became president of the Irish Free State, founded
the Gaelic League in 1893. The League spear-
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• 1880s: Unionists and Catholics are locked in
battle over the sovereignty of Ireland. Scores of
people die in riots.
Today: Despite progress in talks, violence continues between Unionists and Catholics in
Northern Ireland, with numerous casualties on
both sides.
• 1880s: Groups advocating occultism and magic
gain a high degree of popularity in England and
Ireland. Yeats himself participates in a number
of these groups, including the Theosophical So-
headed efforts to revive pride in Irish ethnic and
national identity, supporting various initiatives to
publicize Gaelic language and culture. The “Irish
Ireland” movement also included organizations
such as The Gaelic Athletic Association, formed to
promote traditional Irish sports such as hurling and
football.
Almost as soon as the Yeats family moved to
London in 1887, Yeats became homesick. The new
home, a dark squalid row house in a lower-middleclass neighborhood of Kensington, depressed the
entire family, and Yeats often dreamt of returning
to Ireland. However, Yeats finally found a measure
of solace in the literary scene in London. Not more
than a mile from the Yeats’s house lived William
Morris, poet and father of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose large house and stables were a meeting ground for writers and artists. Morris befriended Yeats, and the poet wrote for Morris’s
socialist magazine, Commonweal.
Yeats returned to Ireland in mid-August, 1887,
and stayed there through the end of the year. During this time, he wrote his first major poem, “The
Wanderings of Oisin,” crafted from Irish folklore.
When Yeats returned to London in 1888, he deepened his associations with London’s writers, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. A
few years later, along with Ernest Rhys, Yeats
formed the Rhymers Club, founded to help young
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ciety and the Hermetic Students of the Golden
Dawn.
Today: The western world experiences a renewed interest in occultism and various forms
of magic. The Order of the Golden Dawn remains in existence and now has its own web site.
• 1880s: The Celtic Revival, a movement against
the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland,
seeks to promote the spirit of Ireland’s native
heritage.
Today: Irish Americans flock to Ireland to explore their ethnic roots and cultural heritage.
poets get their start. From this group, Yeats became
involved with the Irish National Literary Society,
whose members he sparred with on and off in the
coming years. Yeats was also involved during this
time with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and later with the Hermetic Students of the
Golden Dawn. Blavatsky was an occultist and major figure in England and Ireland in the late nineteenth century; her book, The Occult World, was
wildly popular among artists and writers. Blavatsky
held séances, practiced magic, and encouraged followers to pursue “union with the absolute.” Her
emphasis on the spiritual aspects of existence resonated with Yeats’s own anti-materialist sentiments.
Critical Overview
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is one of Yeats’s earlier poems and also one of his best known. It is perhaps so widely known due to its universal subject
matter, that of the conflict between youth and aging, and the longing for emotional escape. Author
William York Tindall, in his book W. B. Yeats,
terms “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” “a vision of escape.” However, some find the poem overly sentimental and prefer Yeats’s later poems. F. R. Leavis,
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in his book New Bearings in English Poetry: A
Study of the Contemporary Situation, cites a statement by Yeats regarding his early poetry:
I tried after the publication of The Wanderings of
Oisin to write of nothing but emotion, and in the simplest language, and now I have had to go through it
all, cutting out or altering passages that are sentimental from lack of thought.
Edmund Wilson, in his book Alex’s Castle: A
Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930,
explores the conflict between Yeats’s world of
imagination in his poetry and the world of reality:
The world of imagination is shown us in Yeats’s early
poetry as something infinitely delightful, infinitely
seductive, as something to which one becomes delirious and drunken—and as something which is somehow incompatible with, and fatal to, the good life of
that actual world which is so full of weeping and from
which it is so sweet to withdraw.
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Semansky is an instructor of English literature
and composition whose essays, poems, and stories
regularly appear in journals and magazines. In this
essay, Semansky considers the relationship between self-image and daydreaming in Yeats’s
poem.
Yeats’s poem is perhaps most interesting for what
it does not say. Although the speaker expresses the
desire to arise and “go to Innisfree,” he never explicitly states what it is that motivates this desire.
This absence asks readers to infer what compels the
speaker to be other than where he is. People often
daydream when they are dissatisfied with their
lives. They fantasize about how circumstances
might be different and how new surroundings
would make them more content, perhaps even how
such a change would make them different persons.
They see themselves in daydreams differently than
they see themselves in their “waking” life. By examining the speaker’s daydream closely, readers
can deduce the speaker’s current situation and speculate about his inspiration for writing the poem.
The opening line of the poem, repeated as the
first line in the last stanza, tells readers what the
speaker “will” do: “I will arise and go now, and go
to Innisfree.” Echoing the parable of the prodigal
son in the New Testament (Luke: 15:18), which begins, “I will arise and go to my father,” Yeats, consciously or not, infuses his poem with religious
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weight. This choice suggests that the person Yeats
would like to be is the one who returns home, fulfills his familial duties as a son, and yet nonetheless achieves his own separate identity as a poet.
Yeats spent much of his youth in County Sligo,
home to his mother’s family, but they were not particularly happy years. By picturing himself on Innisfree, an island on Lake Gill in Sligo, Yeats can,
imaginatively, both return to the place of his childhood, effecting a kind of redemption, and yet remain separate from it.
In his biography of Yeats, Yeats: The Man and
the Masks, Richard Ellmann notes that Yeats was
in London when he wrote “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and that despite the robust literary scene
there, felt shy and out of place. Ellmann writes, “To
a poor Irishman . . . it seemed alien and hostile. . . .
Yeats often dreamed of beating a retreat to Sligo.”
Ellmann sees Yeats’s homesickness as an unbearable desire, writing that Yeats
filled his poems and stories with dim, pale things,
and longed to return to an island like Innisfree, where
his “old care will cease” because an island was neither mainland nor water but something of both, and
because the return to Sligo, though he knew it now
to be impossible, would be a return to the prepubertal stage when his consciousness had not yet been
split in two.
Some critics go as far as seeing the poem as a
kind of death wish. Henry Merritt, for example, in
his essay, “Rising and Going: The ‘Nature’ of
Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’” argues that
Sligo is closely linked with failure in Yeats’s imagination because it is home to Yeats’s maternal family, the Pollexfens of Sligo, who largely disliked
the poet. A return to Sligo marked a surrender to
the stodgy, provincial values of the Pollexfens,
Merritt argues.
But Yeats never went to Innisfree; the poem
remained at the level of a daydream, albeit one with
specific benefits for the young poet. One of these
is that he was able to grapple with the kind of person he was becoming by imagining the kind of person he might be. The imagery in the first stanza alludes to the life that Thoreau made for himself at
Walden Pond. It is not only the kind of life that
Thoreau lived, however, that Yeats is drawn to but
also the kind of person Thoreau was. An American
transcendentalist who championed civil liberties,
Thoreau was known as much for his politics as he
was for his nature writing. Yeats’s fantasy of living in a Walden-like hut, in Walden-like surroundings, then, is also a fantasy of being the kind
of person who could bring about such a dream—
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strong, self-reliant, full of conviction and initiative.
It is significant that Yeats wrote the poem in his
early twenties, a time when most people are still
struggling to carve out a place for themselves in
the world.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claims
that the purpose of creative writing is to fulfill both
the author’s fantasies and the reader’s. Poets and
fiction writers—those who traffic in fantasies, daydreams, and the world of the imagination—perform
a kind of regulatory function for society, in that
they give voice to fantasies that readers sometimes
do not even know they have. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” remains one of Yeats’s most popular poems because of this very fact. Readers vicariously
participate in Yeat’s fantasy because it is such a
popular and generic one. Although not everyone
necessarily desires to live alone in a small cabin,
the wish to live close to nature and away from the
distractions of modern life is common, as is the
wish to see one’s own self in the best possible light.
Compared to Yeats’s later more modern poetry, the
poem is sentimental and conventional, but these
facts have also helped its popularity, as those very
features make “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” accessible to more readers, meeting their expectations of
what poetry should do.
Yeats moves from simply wishing he were
elsewhere to coming up with a concrete plan for
being there. The details in the first stanza read as
a kind of blueprint for his Eden-like cabin. He
imagines himself as a steward of the land and all
the life on it. The second stanza, however, paints a
more impressionistic scene. In addition to the cabin
and “bee-loud glade,” the speaker will also find
peace, “Dropping from the veils of the morning to
where the cricket sings.” Such emphasis on quiet
and solitude tells readers something about what the
speaker’s current life must be like: crowded, hectic, noisy. Living alone on an island in the midst
of a lake is about as far away from those circumstances as possible. The imagery and figurative language of the second stanza also underscore the
dreamy nature of the speaker’s fantasy, highlighting the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the present and the future, the city and the
country.
Sights, sounds, touches, smells are often catalysts for memories, and the sound of fountain water on a busy London street has evoked the memory of Yeats’s childhood for him. The consuming
nature of the speaker’s desire to leave his present
situation and return to the setting of his childhood
is evident in the last stanza, when he says, “for al-
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Although not
everyone necessarily desires
to live in a small cabin, the
wish to live close to nature
and away from the
distractions of modern life
is common, as is the wish
to see one’s own self in the
best possible light.”
ways night and day / I hear lake water lapping with
low sounds by the shore.” Such an aural hallucination underscores the intensity of Yeats’s memory of Lake Gill and what that memory now represents for him. It is significant that in his
autobiography Yeats says the poem is the first he
had written with anything of his “own music” in it,
for it represents a maturing, both poetically and
emotionally, of the poet’s relationship to his past
and his own self image.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
C. Stuart Hunter
In the following essay, Hunter examines what
Innisfree symbolizes to Yeats as a poet.
In an attempt to explain the nature of the attraction
he feels toward the Devon farm he calls Thorncombe, the protagonist of John Fowles’ Daniel
Martin refers to a passage in Restif de la Bretonne’s eighteenth-century romanced autobiography, Monsieur Nicholas, in which the speaker describes the feeling of total peace and joy found in
a remote, lush, hidden valley in the Burgundian
hills. Fowles’ protagonist, after pointing out that
the Frenchman “baptized the place simply la bonne
vaux: the valley of abundance, the sacred combe,”
goes on to describe the general nature of such
places as “outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, intensely green and fertile, numinous, haunted and haunting, dominated by a
sense of magic that is also a sense of a mysterious
yet profound parity in all existence.” In the context
of Fowles’ novel, this section serves to illustrate
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What
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Next?
• Yeats was a playwright as well as a poet. To
sample some of Yeats’s plays, read The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats (1966),
edited by Russell K. Alspach.
• In Yeats at Work (1965), Bradford Curtis examines selected manuscripts of Yeats, showing
the progression of various poems through numerous revisions.
• Mario D’Avanzo compares “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” with “The Song of Solomon” in his
1971 essay in The McNeese Review.
• Susan Johnston Graf’s 2000 study entitled W. B.
Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus examines
Yeats’s membership in the Order of the Golden
Dawn, an occultist group. Graf also documents
Yeats’s magical practices and their relation to
his work.
• To learn more about Innisfree itself, read Tadhg
Kilgannon’s 1926 book, Sligo and Its Surroundings: A Descriptive and Pictorial Guide to
the History, Scenery, Antiquities and Places of
Interest in and around Sligo.
• Bernard G. Krimm’s W. B. Yeats and the Emergence of the Irish Free State, 1918–1939: Living in the Explosion (1981) examines Yeats’s
writing and career in relation to Ireland’s drive
to free itself of British control at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
• Tom Mulvany’s essay entitled “The Genesis of
a Lyric: Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’”
explores how Yeats came to write the poem. It
is part of the Winter 1965 volume of Texas
Quarterly, pp. 160–64.
both the necessity for the artist to find a place of
retreat and the fact that such places exist for him,
as an artist and human being, not simply as geographic locations but also, and more importantly,
as symbolic settings. La bonne vaux, while a physical place, is more importantly a state of mind in
which the individual is linked by the significant de-
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• Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Ireland: A
Concise History (1972) presents a compact and
unbiased history of Ireland, complete with informative photographs. Maire O’Brien is the
daughter of Sean Mac Entee, veteran of the Rising of 1916 and former Irish politician.
• Many poets have parodied Yeats’s poem. One
of the best-known parodies is Ezra Pound’s 1916
poem entitled “The Lake Isle.”
• A. G. Stock’s 1961 book from Cambridge University Press, W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and
Thought, is one of the more useful and accessible critical introductions to the writer’s work.
• Oliver Stonor’s 1933 essay “Three Men of
the West,” published in John o’ London’s
Weekly, recounts the author’s trip to Innisfree
to get a first-hand view of what inspired
Yeats’s poem.
• In Builders and Makers: Occasional Studies
(1944), Gilbert Thomas argues that Yeats never
built a cabin on Innisfree because he was better
off living the life of the imagination.
• Yeats was much influenced by Thoreau’s book
Walden, originally published in 1854, and he alludes to a passage from the book in “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree.” Students would benefit from
comparing Thoreau’s ideas on nature and the
solitary life with those of Yeats.
• J. B. Yeats’s Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and
Others (1944) provides an intimate portrait in
letters of the close friendship between Yeats and
his father.
tails of his surrounding to a symbolic world that
stretches beyond the boundaries of human time and
space. In his description of the lake isle of Innisfree, W. B. Yeats presents his version of la bonne
vaux, an ostensibly nostalgic description of a specific geographic location that, through the particular physical details and the symbolic force of those
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details, is transformed into a symbolic landscape.
Like Daniel Martin’s Thorncombe and Monsieur
Nicholas’ bonne vaux, Yeats’ lake isle is private
and enclosed, in this case by the waters of Lough
Gill. It is fertile, as the beans and bees clearly indicate. It is numinous, in that it is both a physical
island and a state of mind created by that island. It
is haunted by the mythical Tuatha da Danaan and
is haunting to the speaker of the poem, as the last
stanza clearly reveals. In fact, Yeat’s view of the
island in his youth was dominated by the magical
and mysterious story about the Tuatha da Danaan
and the Danaan Quicken tree:
I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree . . . I should live, as Thoreau
lived, seeking wisdom. There was a story in the
county history of a tree that had once grown upon
that island guarded by some terrible monster and
borne the food of the gods. A young girl pined for
the fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and
carry the fruit away. He did as he had been told, but
tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland
where she had waited for him, was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she
too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether I
chose the island [as the proposed place of retreat] because of its beauty or for the story’s sake, but I was
twenty-two or three before I gave up the dream.
Yeats’ attitude to the lake isle of Innisfree,
then, is markedly similar to the attitude described
by Fowles’ narrator in Daniel Martin. The importance of Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,”
a work often dismissed as a youthful, nostalgic, derivatively romantic lyric, lies in the very qualities
that make the physical setting numinous for the author as young artist. Through a careful examination
of the precise details and specific symbolism of the
poem, one comes to see that, for the young Yeats,
the retreat to the island of Innisfree is a journey in
search of poetic wisdom and spiritual peace, a journey prompted by supernatural urgings, a journey in
quest of identity within a tradition. The wisdom and
peace that are the goal of the quest can only be realized through a poetic and spiritual grasp of the
parity and even identity that exists between the legendary past of the Celtic world and the present, and
of the presence of that past in the mind and spirit
of the artist attuned to the numinous qualities of his
particular bonne vaux.
Of the genesis of the poem and of its relationship to Yeats’ development as a poet we know a
great deal. By the time the poem began to take shape,
some time late in 1888, the young poet had already
published Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland
(Dublin, 1888), and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish
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. . . for the young
Yeats, the retreat to the
island of Innisfree is a
journey in search of poetic
wisdom and spiritual peace,
a journey prompted by
supernatural urgings, a
journey in quest of identity
within a tradition.”
Peasantry (Dublin, 1888), and was about to publish
his first major volume of verse based on the Irish
legends he had heard and learned during his frequent
visits with his mother’s parents in Sligo, The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems (London, 1889).
Although his thorough involvement in the Celtic Renaissance would not bear significant poetic fruit until the latter part of the 1890s, it is clear from the poems written in the early part of the decade, and
indeed in the latter 1880s, that Yeats was fully aware
of the poetic potential of the Celtic legends of Ireland and of his relationship, as poet, to the Celtic
tradition. The specific background of “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree” is made clear for us both by the commentaries of Jeffares and Alspach and by Yeats’ own
autobiographical comments. His familiarity with the
connection between the Tuatha da Danaan and the
island of Innisfree is clear from the passage from the
Autobiographies cited above. Yeats had gleaned the
legend of the Danaan Quicken tree from William
Gregory Wood-Martin’s History of Sligo (1882) and
seems to have used the idea of a plant or tree sacred
to the Celtic gods not only as the basis for the poem
“The Danaan Quicken Tree” but also, with some
transformation, in the bean rows of the poem under
examination here. The early version of the poem,
sent to Katharine Tynan in 1888, contains the text
of the first two stanzas, including the details of the
dwelling of clay and wattles, the bee hives and bean
rows, and mention of the sounds and colours of the
island. It lacks, however, the final stanza, the stanza
that pulls the poem together and gives it its specific
context and direction. Yeats tells us about the genesis of the final stanza—if not the entire poem—in
the Autobiographies:
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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens,
of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through
Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of
water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which
balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance
came my poem “Innisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.
The first printed version of the work appeared
in The National Observer for 13 December, 1890,
and the poem was then reprinted in The Book of
the Rhymers’ Club (London, 1892), and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics
(London, 1892), without substantive changes.
Yeats then included the poem in more than twenty
collections of his works published between 1892
and the time of his death, again without substantive changes. Given that Yeats was constantly—
and not always productively—revising his early
work, it is significant that this poem was left virtually untouched through almost fifty years in
which it could have been altered. This lack of tampering or revising seems to argue for its being one
of the few early poems that Yeats considered to
have achieved, in his eyes, its perfect expression at
an early point in his poetic development. It is also
significant to note that, with the exception of its inclusion in the first two collections, it does not appear in any of the works that Yeats organized
around a particular thematic principle. Rather, it
stands as a single, isolated work, a world unto itself, which seems to argue for its being considered
a central statement in his poetic development. Interesting though the genesis and printing history of
the poem might be, however, it is in the content of
the poem, in the rich symbolic and mythic matrices for the work, that its major importance lies.
Stylistically speaking, the poem is not remarkable. It clearly shows, in its fascination with detail,
the influence of the Pre-Raphaelitism of the
Rhymers’ Club, and also demonstrates, in its succession of three fairly regular quatrains, the influence of the lyrics of the Romantics. The first stanza,
after describing the basic motivation of the speaker,
goes on to give details of the habitation he will build
in his retreat. The second stanza then details the benefits that he will derive from his solitary existence.
The final stanza then adds urgency by contrasting
the images of the rural retreat with the bustle of urban life, thereby strengthening the motivation behind the resolution expressed in the first line. In
form, then, the poem is a simple nostalgic lyric expressing the speaker’s desire to find a kind of peace
in a place of rural solitude he has known in his
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youth. Aside from some minor metrical effects,
there is nothing in the form and structure of the
poem to indicate a departure from tradition in the
work. The music of which Yeats speaks in the Autobiographies is heard not through the form of the
poem but rather through the symbolic dimensions
of the imagery, and one of those dimensions is seen
in the role of the speaker. The speaker in the poem
is presented as a seeker or questor. The initial line,
with its ironic echo of the prodigal son’s resolution,
strengthens this notion, as does the double mention
of the roadway in line 11. The actual location described in the first two stanzas of the poem, both in
terms of the times mentioned and the specific details of geographical location, strengthens the idea
that the speaker is seeking something more than a
place in which to relax. The particular physical details that are provided in the first two stanzas describe not only an actual place but also a state of
mind achieved because of the place. The description of time in the second stanza, with its double
mention of evening and midnight, also stresses that
the place is one in which mental and not physical
vision is the important factor. The poem is presented, furthermore, through a first-person speaker.
The air of immediacy created through the use of this
kind of narrative voice amplifies the subjectivity of
the utterance and stresses the importance of the
dream or vision to the speaker himself. The retreat
to Innisfree will be a solitary retreat; but it will be
one that links the speaker, through the visions described, with his natural and, from what we know
about the mythic significance of the island, supernatural world. The simplicity of rhetorical devices
in the poem has, at once, a charm and yet an archaic air. The simplicity serves to stress the romantic nostalgia of the poem, but the deliberate archaisms—archaisms that, although he later
repudiated them, Yeats did not choose to change—
link the poem to the past, to the traditions of a day
gone by and yet still present in the setting described.
It is in the imagery and the allusions of the poem,
though, more than in the type of speaker, choice of
verse form, or particular rhetorical techniques, that
Yeats makes his strongest statement, a statement
that links the subjective speaker of the poem to a
tradition that, because it stretches back to the Celtic
vision both of the significance of the lake isle of Innisfree and of the role of the poet/hermit, objectifies the experience at the core of the work.
One of the central allusions in the poem, however, seems initially to have little to do with the
Celtic. In describing the crops of the island, Yeats
specifically mentions two things: honey and beans.
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Although the latter may seem out of place, when
one remembers the two passages in the Autobiographies that refer directly to the poem, one notes
that, in both cases, Yeats mentions Thoreau, the
bean-cultivating hermit of Walden pond. Yeats’
youthful desire was to live “in imitation of Thoreau
on Innisfree”, “to live, as Thoreau did, seeking wisdom.” Thoreau tells us that, when he went to
Walden Pond, he was “determined to know beans.”
As Thoreau’s editor points out, “A common expression in New England is ‘He doesn’t know
beans,’ meaning the person is ignorant.” To put it
another way, to know beans is to be wise. Hence
one can see that it is possible for Yeats to have
equated, tropologically, Thoreau’s cultivation of
beans with his pursuit of wisdom. In speaking of
Walden Pond, Thoreau comments on the memories
he has of a childhood visit there, of his awareness
of those who dwelt there in the past, of his awareness of the birds and animals there, of the fact that
gardening has long been a venerated occupation of
intelligent men, and of the connection between gardening and ritual, of the connection between farming and the making of a better mankind. Familiar
with Thoreau’s work, the young Yeats was also familiar with the way in which Thoreau saw the retreat to a childhood-visited rural setting and the occupation of oneself in gardening as tropes for the
poetic retreat in search of wisdom. In his nostalgic
lyric description of Innisfree, Yeats carefully points
out his awareness of the birds there, of the speaker’s
occupation as a gardener, and of the peace that
comes from such an occupation in such a place. To
connect the retreat to Innisfree with Thoreau’s retreat to Walden in search of wisdom, Yeats carefully includes not only the mention of the honeybee, traditionally a symbol of industry, culture, and
wisdom, but also the bean plant. Through this latter image, one sees a connection between Yeats’
retreat and Thoreau’s that places the former’s retreat into a particular symbolic context. Through
the references to Thoreau in the Autobiographies,
then, and through the image of the bean in the first
stanza, one sees a close connection between the nature and objectives of the hermit of Walden Pond
and the speaker in Yeats’ poem. Yet the context of
the retreat to Innisfree is more specifically defined
through the connections that the location has with
particular aspects of Celtic folklore, another branch
of the tree of knowledge with which Yeats was
quite familiar.
Writing in The Speaker in 1893, Yeats remarked that “Folklore is at once the Bible, the
Thirty-nine articles, and the Book of Common
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Prayer, as well nigh all the great poets have lived
by its light, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe, and Keats, were
little more than folk-lorists with musical tongues.”
Yeats’ interest in folk-lore had already led him to
publish Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
(London, 1888) and to use the material of Irish folk
mythology as the basis of many of the selections
in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (Dublin,
1888) and The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London, 1889). As Daniel Hoffman remarks
in his recent study of Yeats, Graves, and Muir—
three poets who developed from their awareness of
folk-lore a particularly coherent and compelling
personal mythology that links the individual to the
tradition—:
Not only ballad tradition but folk beliefs in the supernatural and the body of myths and legends from
the Irish Heroic Age contributed subjects to [Yeats’]
poems and plays. His firsthand observation, when a
youth, of the folklore beliefs in the West of Ireland
comprised his initial experience of the spiritual reality denied by the deterministic philosophy of the day
. . . Critics have little heeded Yeats’ tenacity in holding and remolding the folk beliefs with which he
started out. Much though he remade his style and
changed his attitudes toward life, he did not repudiate this first area of his experience and research. Instead he found ways to change his use of it to conform with the evolution of his art and of his thought.
Yeats’ awareness of folk belief is connected
with his desire to retreat to Innisfree, as the Autobiographies show. After recounting the legend of
the Danaan Quicken Tree, he remarks: “I do not
remember whether I chose the island [of Innisfree
for my retreat] because of its beauty or for the
story’s sake . . . ” Although the former may be sufficient reason in itself, the latter is more pressing
in terms of the symbolism of the poem. The dominance of the Tuatha da Danaan in Yeats’ poetic
imagination forms a link between the young poet,
the folk mythologies, and the island of Innisfree
that stretches throughout Yeats’ verse. The Tuatha
da Danaan, as one folklorist points out, were early
invaders of Ireland, closely schooled in the Druidic
mysteries. Defeated by the Sons of Míl, they made
a deal with the Gaels whereby the Gaels were left
to control the upper or human world and the Tuatha
da Danaan were left to rule the world under
ground, from which world they controlled magic
and led a life largely independent of human society. They are creatures of the ‘other world.’
“Theirs is an idealised, magic counterpart of the
natural world into which mortal men rarely intrude except by invitation or by accident.” “The
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Hosting of the Sidhe,” the first poem in Yeats’ The
Wind Among the Reeds (London, 1899), has a
lengthy headnote in which Yeats gives a lengthy
description of the Tuatha da Danaan, or “the Sidhe
. . . the people of the Faery Hills.” In that headnote Yeats comments, in a passage that deals with
the contact between the human world and the
world of the Tuatha da Danaan, that “If any one
becomes too much interested in them [the people
of the Sidhe, the Tuatha da Danaan], and sees them
over much, he loses all interest in ordinary things.
I shall write a great deal elsewhere about such enchanted persons . . . ” As we shall see in a moment, the speaker in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
may very well be one of those “enchanted persons,” but to grasp the full significance of the enchantment and its connection with the artist’s pursuit of wisdom and peace, we must look further
into the origins of the Tuatha da Danaan.
Robert Graves remarks in The White Goddess,
that “According to legend, the Danaans had come
to Britain [and to Ireland] from Greece by way of
Denmark to which they had given the name of their
goddess . . . ” At another point in his discussion of
their origins, Graves describes the Tuatha da
Danaan as “Bronze Age Pelasgians expelled from
Greece in the middle of the second millenium . . . ”
He further identifies Danu, their goddess, with the
pre-Achean goddess Danaë of Argos, a figure he
sees as one of the many embodiments of the White
Goddess. Yeats remarks, when speaking of Danu
and her followers, that “The old Gaelic literature is
full of appeals of the Tribes of the goddess Danu
to . . . mortals whom they would bring into their
country . . . ” It would appear, then, that the Tuatha
da Danaan exist as a tribe of fairy people intimately
connected with the legendary history of Ireland,
who still inhabit the land, and who are interested,
from time to time, in luring those mortals interested
in them into their enchanted faery otherworld. The
enchantment that the speaker in “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” feels may indeed be seen as a form in
that lure. Yeats says in the Autobiographies that he
recalled Innisfree when he heard the water in the
fountain. The speaker in the poem, on the other
hand, hears the insistent lapping sound of lake water, a sound that is closely connected with the
Tuatha da Danaan:
To this day the Tribes of the goddess Danu that are
in the waters beckon to men . . . The people of the
waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely,
for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams.
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The call felt by the speaker in “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree” may indeed, given the symbolic contexts of the poem, by a call from the fairy people
to whom Innisfree was once a holy place, because
of the Danaan Quicken tree. In his headnote to the
discarded poem “The Danaan Quicken Tree”, a
poem published originally in The Bookman in 1893,
Yeats mentions the tree that he speaks of at greater
length in his recounting of the legend of the tree in
the Autobiographies. Yeats’ knowledge of Irish
folklore in general, then, and his particular awareness of the connection between the Tuatha da
Danaan and the lake isle of Innisfree, would argue
for a close connection in his mind between the luring habits of the Tuatha da Danaan and the island
itself. The peace that comes to the person who inhabits the island, then, is a peace that derives from
a poetic, a spiritual grasp of the tradition and the
traditional powers of the ancient fairy people to
whom the island was once a sacred spot. The vegetation of the island, furthermore, is of particular
importance to its sacred nature. The retreat to the
lake isle of Innisfree, then, is not only a poetic retreat in pursuit of wisdom but also a retreat in
search of and possibly in response to the urgings
of the goddess Danu. The direct link between wisdom, Innisfree, and the Tuatha da Danaan becomes
quite clear when one examines closely the detailed
description that the poet provides of the habitation
his speaker will build there and of the particular
horticultural pursuits in which he will engage.
In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker argues that he will build himself a small cabin out of
clay and wattles in a setting that has echoes of Eden,
of Thoreau’s hermitage at Walden Pond, and of the
sacred combe of Restif de la Bretonne’s Monsieur
Nicholas. In the description of the building materials to be used for the cabin one sees not just the
traditional building materials of the rural peasant
but also a connection between the world of man
and the world of the Tuatha da Danaan. The cabin
is to be built of clay and wattles. Clay, being a material linked symbolically with man, needs no explication. The wattles, on the other hand, carry with
them a symbolic association that links them with
Celtic mythology and specifically with the Aes
Sidhe, the Tuatha da Danaan. It was the people of
the sidhe who were responsible for building the circular hill forts known as raths or Dane Raths, the
basic component of which structures was wattles
from the hazel tree. Robert Graves points out that,
in Celtic mythology, “the hazel was the Bile Ratha,
‘the venerated tree of the rath’—the rath in which
the poetic Aes Sidhe lived”. He also indicates,
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though, that “with the ancient Irish the tree of eloquence and wisdom was the hazel.” Hence it appears that the type of cabin that Yeats’ speaker
plans to build is closely linked both to the “poetic
Aes Sidhe” and to the matters of eloquence and wisdom. Yeats’ choice of particular detail in this case
directs the reader to a specific connection between
the apparently simple descriptive surface and the
actual symbolic depth of the poem. The connection
between the Aes Sidhe and the speaker in “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree” is further elaborated when one
considers the horticultural aspect of the Innisfree
garden or grove. The “hive for the honeybee” draws
in the traditional symbolism of the bee as a figure
associated with sweetness and light, with culture
and wisdom; but the key reference in the third line
is to the “Nine bean-rows.”
Critics have puzzled for some time over the
precision of detail in this reference and over the
particular significance both of the number used and
the bean itself. One critic explains the precise detail in terms of Yeats’ stylistic affinities at the time
the poem was written:
Another poem of Yeats which seems to imitate a PreRaphaelite painting is ‘She Dwelt among the
Sycamores,’ . . . Here it is the insistence upon ‘precision’ of coloring and number, and upon a microscopic focus in general which marks the tell-tale PreRaphaelite objective of ‘truth to nature.’ The single
‘ash-grey feather’; the ‘six feet / lapped in the lemon
daffodils’; the ‘four eyes’—all these represent the
practice of artistic principles which began with the
seven stars of the Blessed Damozel’s crown and
reached as far as the ‘nine bean rows’ of the Lake
Isle.
Though Eddins may be correct about the stylistic source of the precision in the lines, he does
not answer the question about the reasons for
Yeats’ choice of the plant or the number of rows.
Alspach suggests a reason in a somewhat facetious
fashion when he states that “one clever Yeats
Freudian-critic has said of the nine bean-rows of
the third line of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: that
undoubtedly they symbolize the nine months of
pregnancy.” A deeper searching of the Celtic
mythology that plays such a large part in Yeats’
poetry reveals a much more plausable reason for
the use both of the bean and of the number nine.
The number can be explained by examining further
the reference to the wattles of the cabin. The number nine, Graves remarks, is “traditionally associated with Coll, the hazel, the tree of Wisdom . . . ”
He further comments that “The letter Coll was used
as the Bardic numeral nine—because nine is the
number sacred to the Muses and because the hazel
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fruits after nine years.” He also points out the close
connection in Celtic mythology between the hazel
tree, the number nine, and poetic wisdom:
The ninth tree is the hazel, in the nutting season. The
nut in Celtic legend is always an emblem of concentrated wisdom: something sweet, compact and
sustaining enclosed in a small hard shell . . . The
Rennes Dinnshechas . . . describes a beautiful fountain called Connla’s Well, near Tipperary, over which
hung the nine hazels of poetic art which produced
flowers and fruit (i.e. beauty and wisdom) simultaneously. As the nuts dropped into the well they fed
the salmon swimming in it, and whatever number of
nuts any of them swallowed, so many bright spots
appeared on its body. All the knowledge of the arts
and sciences was bound up with the eating of these
nuts.
In the poem Yeats has specified the number
nine and has already mentioned the “wattles” for
which the hazel has been traditionally prized. Since
Innisfree was the place on which grew the Danaan
Quicken tree, whose fruit was ‘able to endow [mortals] with more than mortal powers”, since Yeats
himself states that the wisdom provided by the
Tuatha da Danaan is “the wisdom of the fools of
Celtic stories, that is above all the wisdom of the
wise”, and since the hazel nut is connected with
wisdom, it is logical to assume that Yeats’ choice
of the number nine is a reflection of his awareness
of its connection with the numerology of Celtic
mythology in general and its connection with wisdom in particular. This argument is supported by
Yeats’ use of the bean as well. Yeats’ speaker does
not plant or cultivate hazel trees, but bean rows.
Yet the bean, as was mentioned earlier in connection with Thoreau, is also associated with wisdom:
to know beans is to be wise. In this context, it would
seem that the bean, like the hazel nut something
“compact and sustaining” enclosed in a seed pod,
is being used as a tropological analogue for the
hazel nut. When one realizes that the bean is, as
well, connected with poetic wisdom and with
magic, the argument gains greater force. The bean
has traditionally been associated with magic and
with the supernatural: “Pliny in his Natural History
records the belief that the souls of the dead reside
in beans. According to the Scottish poet Montgomerie (1605), witches rode on bean stalks to their
sabbaths.” The bean is also as Graves further suggests, scared to the White Goddess and therefore
associated with poetic wisdom. From this group of
folk-lore connections, it would appear that the reason for the choice of the particular detail in the third
line of the poem lies in the associations made with
the numerological significance of the number
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nine—both in classical and Celtic mythology—and
with the relationship between beans and poetic wisdom on the one hand and the hazel nut and poetic
wisdom on the other. The “peace” that comes
“dropping slow”, then, is the peace that comes from
the wisdom gained from the bean rows. In the
Autobiographies Yeats argues that he dreamt of returning to Innisfree to “live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.” In the poem under examination here
the particular nature of the wisdom sought is clarified when one examines the symbolic and mythological connections and allusions of the first stanza
of the poem and realizes that the wisdom that is
gained in the “bee-loud glade” is a spiritual wisdom, a wisdom “above all the wisdom of the wise”,
a wisdom of a poetic character that is gained
through an association with the magic and the mystery surrounding the Tuatha da Danaan and the poet
who answers the call of the fairy people.
Whereas the first stanza of the poem establishes the general nature of the bonne vaux or sacred combe, the second stanza delineates the benefits derived therefrom. The peace that descends on
the speaker in the second stanza is not described in
explicit detail, but the colouring and tonality of the
stanza, as well as the presence of the linnet, suggest that it is more than a sense of physical relaxation. On a superficial level the imagery of the
stanza suggests a quiet rural Irish scene, complete
with linnets at evening, mist in the morning, and
particular colourations in the skies. The presence
of the linnet, however, suggests that the peace
achieved is more than physical repose. The linnet
occurs in only one other poem by Yeats, “A Prayer
for my Daughter,” written some thirty years after
the composition of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In
the “Prayer” the linnet functions as a symbol for
the purity and sweetness Yeats hopes will be his
daughter’s lot:
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound . . .
The linnet, like the bees in the first stanza of
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” is connected with
sweetness and beauty. In the second stanza, it is the
sound and the sight of the linnet’s wings that attracts the speaker, and in this case suggests an analogy of a spiritual nature, drawing on the traditional
association of birds with the soul. This would suggest that the peace achieved through intercourse
with the Aes Sidhe is a peace that transcends the
merely physical and stands sharply in contrast with
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the urban, mundane images of the final stanza of
the poem.
In the final stanza we are returned from the
speaker’s world of reverie to the world of reality.
The resolution of the poem’s first line is reiterated,
but this time with an insistence not present in the
somewhat nostalgic initial statement. Instead we
find that now the motivation to return to Innisfree
is there “Always night and day” because of the
sound of lake water. “To this day the Tribes of the
goddess Danu that are in the waters beckon to men
. . . ” Yet the beckoning comes not to the physical
ear; instead it is heard by “the deep heart’s core.”
The sound that lures the speaker back to Innisfree
is less a sound that is audible to the physical ear
than a prompting to the ear of the spirit. The speaker
is drawn back to Innisfree by the fairy magic of the
tribes of the goddess Danu. In the choice of words
and the use of images in the final stanza, Yeats
skillfully makes explicit a contrast both between
the rural and the urban and between the physical
and the spiritual that has been implicit in the first
two stanzas. In reading the final stanza the reader
comes to see the noumenal nature of Innisfree.
Through an examination of the precise detail
and specific symbolism of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” the reader can come to see that, for Yeats,
this small island in Lough Gill, just “opposite Slish
Wood”, is more than just a physical place and that
the desire to return to that spot is more than simply the homesick reaction of a young man far from
his native soil. When one stops seeing the speaker
as the author, when one stops viewing the poem
simply as a nostalgic lyric, when one looks instead
at the poem as an expression of the nature of the
artist and his relationship to both the physical and
symbolic aspects of his nature, land, and tradition,
one begins to see that the lake isle of Innisfree is
more than a place; like Byzantium, Innisfree is a
state of being. Like Daniel Martin’s Thorncombe,
like the Burgundian valley of Monsieur Nicholas,
Innisfree is another bonne vaux, a valley of abundance, a sacred combe. In that it is an island, and
in that it is enchanted, it is beyond the normal
world. As an island it is surrounded by the wall of
water, and as a magic place it is enclosed by its superstitions. Green and fertile, it clearly is both a
physical garden and a garden or nursery of the
spirit. As the former site of the Danaan Quicken
tree, it is haunted by the children of the goddess
Danu and still exercises its haunting power on those
few who will listen through the sound of the lake
waters that lap its shores. It is thereby dominated
not only by a sense of nostalgia but also by a sense
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of the magical and mysterious way in which the
Aes Sidhe, through the wattles of the dwelling,
through the nine bean rows, through the power that
the Celtic tradition displays, still influence the life
of man. For Yeats, the speaker’s return to Innisfree
is a journey in search of poetic wisdom and spiritual peace, a wisdom and peace that can be realized through a poetic and spiritual grasp of the parity that exists between the legendary past of Ireland
and the present day, between the tradition and the
mind that the spirit of the poet who is attuned to
the numinous qualities of la bonne vaux.
Source: C. Stuart Hunter, “Return to la bonne vaux: The
Symbolic Significance of Innisfree,” in Modern Language
Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 70–81.
Sources
Ellmann, Richard, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Norton,
1978.
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, edited by
James Strachey, Avon, 1983.
Leavis, F. R., “The Situation at the End of the War,” in New
Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary
Situation, AMS Press Inc., 1978, pp. 27–74.
Merritt, Henry, “Rising and Going: The ‘Nature’ of Yeats’s
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’” in Journal of the English Association, Vol. 47, No. 188, Summer, 1998.
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Thoreau, Henry David, Walden: An Annotated Edition,
edited by Walter Harding, Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Tindall, William York, W. B. Yeats, Columbia University
Press, 1966, p. 31.
Wilson, Edmund, “W. B. Yeats,” in Alex’s Castle: A Study
in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930, Charles Scribner’s, 1931, pp. 26–63.
Yeats, W. B., The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats,
Collier, 1967.
Further Reading
Alldritt, Keith, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1997.
This is a very accessible study of the ways in which
Yeats carefully constructed his public image as poet,
nationalist, and literary activist. Alldritt explores the
ways in which Yeats’s social environment contributed to his identity.
Graves, Robert, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays
on Poetry, 1922–1949, Hamilton, 1949, pp. 186–88.
Graves’s reading of Yeats’s poem is one of the harshest pieces of criticism written about it.
Jeffares, Norman A., W. B. Yeats: A New Biography, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988.
This is Jeffares second biography of Yeats. His first
appeared just ten years after the poet’s death. In this
biography, Jeffares charts the stages of Yeats’s career, telling the story of his turbulent personal and
public lives.
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The Mystery
Louise Glück
1999
To appreciate fully the meaning of and drive behind Louise Glück’s “The Mystery,” it is helpful
to read the entire collection, Vita Nova, in which
this poem is included. Published in 1999, Vita
Nova, which translates into “new life,” explores the
poet’s emergence from the despair and loneliness
that plagued her for years after her husband left her.
Her previous collection, Meadowlands (1996), recounted the deterioration of her marriage and Vita
Nova picks up where that book left off: Glück’s life
after divorce, drawing from a mixture of allusions
to distraught lovers in Greek mythology and to her
own plight as a rejected, sometimes self-pitying,
woman. But “The Mystery” can be read and enjoyed as a single poem as well, and it stands on its
own as an uplifting testimony to spiritual, emotional, and intellectual rebirth.
Perhaps uncharacteristically for Glück, this
poem’s extended metaphor is based on mystery
writer Rex Stout’s series of novels and short stories featuring the renowned detective Nero Wolfe.
The rotund, sedentary, and brilliant detective is
known for his love of food and orchids as much as
his uncanny knack for solving crimes. Glück uses
the idea of mystery to describe her rise from the
bitter depths of sadness and abandonment, likening
the process to one of a person who has emerged
from the dark to become “a creature of light.” In
essence, she is able to find resolution for at least
some of her emotional pain and in doing so she
has “acquired in some measure / the genius of the
master”—in this case, Nero Wolfe.
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Author Biography
Louise Glück was born in New York City in
1943 to well-educated and well-to-do parents. Her
mother attended Wellesley College, and her father
was a successful businessman of Hungarian descent. One of the most profound events of Glück’s
life happened before she was even born: the death
of her older sister, the family’s first child. Although
Glück never knew her sister, the tragedy of the
girl’s death inspired themes of grief and loss that
pervade much of the poet’s work even today.
As a teenager, Glück developed anorexia, and,
when her struggle with the condition worsened, her
parents withdrew her from her last year in high
school to begin sessions of psychoanalysis. The
therapy lasted seven years. According to Glück, the
sessions not only helped her to overcome anorexia
but also taught her to organize her own thoughts
with more discipline and rigor. She used her newly
acquired thought processing to create poetry, believing that method and control were beneficial in
communicating both emotionally and intellectually.
A year after psychoanalysis, Glück enrolled in
a poetry workshop at Columbia University where
she worked closely with poet and teacher Stanley
Kunitz. Glück acknowledges that Kunitz—named
the poet laureate of the United States in 2000 at the
age of ninety-five—has been a major influence
throughout her career. Kunitz received numerous
awards over his own lengthy life, including the
prestigious Bollingen Prize, awarded every two
years by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book of recently published
poetry, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Fittingly, Glück received the Bollingen Prize in 2001
for her book Vita Nova, which includes the poem
“The Mystery.”
Louise Glück
rently, she makes her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Williams College.
While her sister’s death and her own struggle
with anorexia left lifelong imprints on Glück’s
mind and work, probably the most significant influence in her later life was the break-up of her marriage. With personal loss as a central theme, Glück
has produced eight volumes of poetry and a collection of essays discussing the theoretical aspects
of poetry. Besides the Bollingen Prize, she has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a
Guggenheim fellowship, the Award in Literature
from the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters, and a Pulitzer Prize, among others. Although Glück never earned a college degree, she
has been teaching at universities since 1970. Cur-
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Lines 2–5
Media
Adaptations
• In 1989, the Lannan Foundation, in association
with Metropolitan Pictures and EZTV, produced
a videotape simply titled Louise Glück. The tape
runs sixty minutes and includes a reading by the
poet at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and an
interview with her by Lewis MacAdams.
• In 1991, the Lannan Foundation produced a
sixty-minute videotape of fifteen major poets
reading and discussing their work. The tape is
titled Where Poems Come From and includes
Louise Glück, Joy Harjo, Philip Levine, and
Allen Ginsberg, among others.
Glück acknowledges that she wrote all the poems collected in Vita Nova at a rapid pace, completing a draft of the entire manuscript in only three
weeks. She has said that they were written in hotel
rooms and elevators, on airplanes, and while she
was visiting friends in California. Apparently, “The
Mystery” was written in her friend’s “driveway in
California” where yellow roses bloom nearby. The
first stanza is full of references to the bright color,
which represents the “light” she feels she has entered into. California is known as the “Golden
State,” the flowers she sees match the color of bright
red fire hydrants, and a baby rolls by in its yellow
stroller. The mention of the baby that makes “bubbling fishlike sounds” (as normal babies do) sets up
a metaphor later in the poem when Glück compares
her own situation to that of a baby in a stroller.
Lines 6–8
Line 6 parallels line 2, but it narrows down the
description of where the poet is sitting: “in a folding chair” in the driveway, reading a mystery novel.
The fact that she is “reading Nero Wolfe for the
twentieth time” is ironic in that one does not usually read the same mystery over and over. After all,
the excitement of a “whodunit” is over when the
reader knows who committed the crime and how.
But that is precisely why Glück keeps poring over
the book—the mystery has become comforting, or
“restful,” to her.
Lines 9–11
Poem Summary
Line 1
The first line of Glück’s “The Mystery” foretells the poem’s outcome. After taking the reader
through the trying recollections of depression and
loss, the speaker survives the dark side of her life
to become “a creature of light.” This line would
work just as well as a last line, for it serves as the
resolution to the speaker’s—Glück’s, actually—
problem.
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In these lines, the poet tells why the book is
restful. After reading it so many times, she obviously knows “who the innocent are,” and she even
feels that she has picked up some of the savvy detective’s ability to deduce a solution from the available evidence. Her own mind is nearly as “supple,”
or agile, as that of “the master” because it, too, can
envision both the past and the future—in other
words, move “in two directions.” Note here that
Glück does not say she knows who the guilty is (or
are), but the innocent. This is another ironic twist
since the average reader is more likely to say, “I
know who did it now,” emphasizing the criminal
instead of the victim(s). Innocence plays a bigger
role in the poet’s emergence from the dark, as she
will describe later in the poem.
Lines 12–13
On one hand, these two lines simply refer to
the way a good detective solves a crime. His or her
mind must be able to move “backward / from the
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act to the motive” to understand what made the
criminal commit the crime in the first place. Then,
the mind needs to move “forward to just resolution” to bring the case to a close. On the other hand,
these lines represent Glück’s own mind thinking
back on why (“the motive”) her husband left her
(“the act”) and then resolving to look to the future
(“forward”) and leave the past behind.
“search for justice,” and series of delusions that one
typically finds in a good detective story are part of
the make-up of Glück’s former marriage and relationship with her husband. Apparently, she was the
one who felt the need to search for justice in all that
transpired between them, for the end of the poem
implies that even though she was the victim in their
eventual divorce, she benefited from it as well.
Lines 14–17
Lines 29–30
In this stanza, Glück directly addresses her
own heart, telling it never to be afraid again. Playing off the idea of becoming “a creature of light,”
she tells her heart that the only thing that may
now bring darkness is the “shadow” of a “narrow [palm]” trying to squeeze it. But she assures
her heart that the shadow—most likely her exhusband’s—cannot “enclose you absolutely.” The
“shadows of the east,” meaning the eastern United
States, where she and her husband lived and where
their marriage ended, had apparently been strong
enough to enclose her heart in complete darkness,
but she no longer has that fear.
Lines 29 and 30 allude to some of the benefits. Her life—or her husband, perhaps—may have
pushed her around willy-nilly, but she “saw amazing things” along the way, becoming “almost radiant” toward the end of her journey through marriage, divorce, depression, and, finally, acceptance
of it all. Glück again refers to brightness and light,
using the word “radiant” to describe her new life,
or “vita nova.”
Lines 18–19
These two lines imply a helplessness on the
speaker’s part, based on the way line 18 is worded.
Notice that she does not say, “I went many places
in my life,” but, instead, speaks of her life as though
it is an entity separate from herself: “My life took
me many places” (italics added). She then claims
that those places were “very dark,” reaffirming the
notion that she has now come forth into the light.
Lines 31–33
Referring back to the Nero Wolfe novel, the
speaker claims that she carried the book everywhere, “like an eager student.” Apparently, she
finds the “simple mysteries” comforting—thus, the
need for “clinging” to them—because they are
much easier to grasp than the puzzle that real life
often becomes.
Lines 34–36
Lines 24–25
Glück ends the poem by revealing her reason
for “clinging to these simple mysteries”: understanding the simpler riddles, or even crimes, makes
it easier for her to stop accusing herself of doing
something wrong in her marriage, to stop blaming
herself for its failure, and perhaps for the state of
depression she fell into afterwards. Line 36 is typical of Glück’s style of writing poetry, for she often includes a series of questions and answers as
lines or full stanzas in a poem. Generally, the questions and answers represent an inner dialogue, or
self-examination, as a means of understanding her
emotions and thoughts. The final line of “The Mystery” implies that she feels a need to identify the
person she now is and to find a purpose for her new
existence as a “creature of light.”
Lines 24 and 25 seem almost accusatory, as
the poet claims her past life pushed her around in
an “entirely arbitrary” fashion with no apparent
plan or “form” to follow.
Themes
Lines 26–28
Irony and the “New Life”
These three lines again imply the “mystery”
metaphor, but here the “threats and questions,”
In the late thirteenth century, a young Dante
Alighieri fell in love. Though he would later be best
Lines 20–23
These lines make up the metaphor referred to
earlier regarding the baby in the stroller. Still viewing her life as a separate, free-willed being, she
claims that it “took me without my volition”—that
is, without her own conscious choice or decision.
She compares her life to the person pushing the
baby in the yellow stroller. Here, her life is the one
“pushing me from behind, / from one world to another,” and she is the “fishlike baby” who has no
control over where it is going.
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Topics for
Further
Study
• In “The Mystery,” Glück spends the fourth and
fifth stanzas describing her “dark” past and her
sense that she was like a baby in a stroller being shoved from place to place. But then she
abruptly claims, “And yet I saw amazing
things.” What “amazing things” do you think
she saw and how could they offset the obvious
misery she felt as well?
• Most people’s lives have been touched by divorce, either in their own family, or in one they
are close to. Consider how your own life, or that
of someone close to you, has been affected by
the break-up of a marriage and write an essay
on how the people involved survived it. You do
not need to identify people specifically—only
describe their methods of coping and how you
may or may not have handled it differently.
• Think of a situation in which you have used inner dialogue as a means for solving an emotional
dilemma. Glück claims that asking herself questions and then answering them helps her to gain
a better understanding of her feelings. Do you
believe this technique has worked for you as
well? Why or why not?
• There is a “sad joke” among literary circles that
the lives of confessional poets, both male and
female, follow a similar pattern: alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Research the confessional
poets and write an essay on the possible connection between a high rate of suicide and this
genre of poetry. Who are some of the bestknown confessional poets? Do they seem to follow this self-destructive pattern? Is this reflected
in their poetry?
known as the author of The Divine Comedy, he first
wrote an account of the woman he loved (but never
really knew) in his verse collection, La Vita Nuova,
or The New Life. Though “Beatrice” appears in both
books, La Vita Nuova describes the course of
Dante’s intense love for her, his premonition of her
death in a dream, her actual death, and his com-
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mitment to eulogizing her life in his writing. Historical accounts claim that Dante’s romance from
afar with Beatrice and the manner in which he presented his lofty idealism in verse influenced love
poetry for centuries to come. The phrase “vita
nuova” was used by many Italians in the middle
ages to imply a new commitment to love and romance. As “The Mystery” suggests, Glück may
have borrowed Dante’s book title for her own collection, but she left his sentiment on romantic love
far behind.
The twentieth-century female American poet
puts an ironic twist on the term “new life.” Here,
a revived, or resurrected, life appears out of the
ashes of romance gone wrong. Glück recalls marriage, love, and heartbreak as “the shadows of the
east” and describes many of the “places” that romantic life took her as “very dark.” She compares
a woman in love to a “fishlike baby,” sitting helplessly in a stroller with no control over his or her
destination. She concludes that her old ideals about
love and happiness must have been mere delusions,
creating mysteries and puzzles in her personal life
that kept her in the dark. Then, the poet emerges
into her “vita nova.” After finally accepting that her
husband is out of her life for good, she trades in
romance for more practical emotions, and for the
ability to solve a love problem the way a detective
solves a crime—with clear thinking, cold reasoning, and rationale. Instead of new life emanating
from the thrill of a new relationship, the idea here
is that it can begin from the end of a bad one. While
it is true that Glück’s and Dante’s themes are polar opposites, the shared title seems to work for
both.
Questions and Answers
In many of Glück’s poems, the speaker—
usually Glück herself—attempts to find a resolution to a problem through a mental dialogue with
herself. The process of asking a question and then
answering it stimulates the mind into thinking more
carefully about an issue, forcing at least partial settlement through introspection. This theme is particularly relevant to Glück because the method it
describes has helped her overcome some of the personal despair and periods of depression that followed the break-up of her marriage. By employing
the Nero Wolfe metaphor and some detective lingo
in “The Mystery,” Glück suggests that even a problem as emotionally upsetting and personally sensitive as the end of a romantic relationship can be
worked through by using deductive reasoning. She
does not, however, imply that the process leads to
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a perfect resolution or a complete change of heart
regarding such a tender matter. Sometimes the best
solution is an unfinished one, allowing gradual
change that seems more realistic than an abrupt
turnabout of emotions. In this way, the poet’s “vita
nova” does not become a volatile burden, but simply a new way of looking at old concerns.
“The Mystery” includes only two questions
and they do not come until the end of the poem. In
the final line, Glück asks, “Who are you and what
is your purpose?” These are questions that she asks
of herself, and she attempts to answer them with
the rest of the poem, before the reader even realizes what the questions are. At first, it may seem
strange and out of context for the poet to ask these
questions of herself. Does she not already know
who she is and what her “purpose” is? Perhaps the
best answer is, at this point in her life, maybe not.
For years, Glück identified herself as a married
woman, secure in a relationship that she thought
would last a lifetime. When that relationship was
cut short, against her will, her identity was forced
to change. In trying to come to terms with that, she
goes through different phases of self-identification.
Apparently, there was a time in the beginning when
“the shadows of the east” caused her heart to “tremble,” as she struggled to deal with the loss. There
was a time when she could identify with a baby being pushed around in a stroller, helpless and at the
mercy of the one pushing. Later, she is “an eager
student,” learning the ways of sound reasoning and
problem solving from a master detective. Finally,
she calls herself “a creature of light,” having used
her new knowledge to find a way out of the darkness of depression and loneliness. By asking the
point-blank questions of herself, then, she had to
find answers—perhaps not the final ones, but at
least some that provide resolution for a while.
Style
Free Verse
Poets who write in contemporary free verse
have fairly free rein in the way they choose to put
words on paper. Without restrictions on line length,
meter, rhyme, or rhythm, this style of poetry lends
itself to more individual manipulation than any
other style. Glück is considered one of the best at
using casual, easily read, straightforward language
in her poetry—a simple style, though not an unsophisticated one. In a review of Vita Nova for the
Chicago Review, critic Steven Monte says that:
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Glück’s verse entices the reader with stylistic effects
familiar to anyone who has leafed through one of her
books: pointed rhetorical questions ... short sentences
whose punch resides in the line breaks . . . rhetorical
afterthoughts warding off melodrama . . . and an evenkeeled, expository tone punctured by defensiveness
and accusation.
Monte’s points are demonstrated in “The Mystery” in the rhetorical questions. No answers are
expected, but Glück offers some anyway, at the end
of the poem and in the rhetorical afterthought of
line 29, “And yet I saw amazing things.” This line
keeps the previous descriptions of bad times and
sad emotions from dipping into sentimentality, or
pathos. Note the “even-keeled expository tone” of
the lines that begin with the word “I”: “I became a
creature of light,” “I sat in a driveway,” “I sat in a
folding chair,” “I know who the innocent are,” “I
became almost radiant at the end,” “I carried my
book everywhere.” The meaning of each line is
clear and the expression is simple, yet interesting.
This is what has made Glück’s style so attractive
to both scholars and general readers. She writes
what people can understand and, often, relate to.
What scholars appreciate most is that the readability of her poems is usually deceptive, cleverly
masking a profound thought or intriguing idea.
Without picking up on every innuendo or every allusion, however, anyone can still follow a Glück
poem, aided by her free-verse style that resembles
casual conversation as much as pure poetry.
Historical Context
The greatest source of Glück’s inspiration derives
from personal loss—whether that loss is through
death, separation, or divorce. While little is written
about the specifics of her own marital problems and
eventual break-up, her poetry is filled with tinges
of rejection, anger, and bitterness, especially those
poems written prior to Vita Nova. Her “new life”
apparently did not begin until the late 1990s, but
the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when
she first started writing and publishing poetry, saw
a softening of the strictness of the expected behavior of the American family and of women in
particular.
After the surge in marriages and childbirth following World War II, commonly called the Baby
Boom era, society took a turn toward liberation and
individual freedom, as opposed to the constraints
of settling into a monogamous relationship, raising
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a family, and living life according to traditional
gender roles. The high value placed on personal
freedom was aided by a growing U.S. economy and
by the fact that women had the opportunity to support themselves instead of being provided for by a
husband. The availability of birth control and female emancipation also contributed to women not
having to marry and form traditional nuclear family structures. As women became more common in
the workforce, many of them gravitated away from
the traditional “female jobs” as secretaries, nurses,
and grade school teachers and into positions geared
more toward business and advancement within a
company. As a result, both men and women found
themselves more committed to their employers than
to each other, and the typical family life of previous decades began to fade. So, too, did the number of people getting married at a young age and
the number of couples who remained married. For
many, being single again simply seemed more attractive.
Today, approximately one marriage out of two
will end in divorce. This has been the trend for the
past two decades, making the end of a marriage as
common as the beginning of one. The old stigma
placed on children of divorced parents is unheard
of now since as many kids come from broken
homes (or from parents who never married in the
first place) as are raised in so-called traditional families. Divorce is common in movies and television
shows, including children’s programming, and it
has become more accepted in religious sects, even
those in which divorcing a spouse was formerly denounced, if not forbidden.
The increase in the divorce rate has also meant
an increase in the poverty rate for women. Even
women with professional careers suffer financial
burdens after divorce settlements that often stipulate no alimony and little child support. Unemployed women or women with low-paying jobs suffer the most. While many divorced women may
feel they have been treated unfairly and blame exhusbands for their economic hardships, the introduction of the no-fault divorce in the 1960s and the
more recent fad of signing prenuptial agreements
are perhaps the true root of many inequities in settlements.
During the conservative movements in America in the 1980s and in the late 1990s, society experienced a shift back toward old-fashioned family
values, and the marriage rate seemed to increase.
Numbers can be deceiving, however, because many
of those marriages were actually second or third
times around for the men and women involved, and
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the divorce rate for people who remarry is even
higher than the rate for first marriages. In other
words, the “newlyweds” of the conservative years
had already contributed to divorce statistics, and in
their new marriages, the cards were stacked against
them from the outset. Statistics, of course, can also
err on the side of pessimism, and undoubtedly thousands of happily remarried couples would be willing to attest to it.
Not all youthful women during the 1960s and
1970s celebrated their freedom to remain single and
pursue a career as well as a variety of personal relationships. Some, like Glück, opted for matrimony
and made plans to spend the rest of their lives with
one man. And when the poet’s marriage ended
sometime around the publication of Meadowlands
in 1996, she did not initially respond with newfound strength and a determination to carry on with
her life in the best way possible. Like many women
and men who endure the break-up of a marriage,
she felt lost, betrayed, frustrated, and unneeded,
eventually slipping into a state of depression. By
the time she wrote the poems for Vita Nova a few
years later, average Americans were still divorcing
as often as they were marrying, and the number of
Internet web sites dedicated to information surviving divorce rivaled the self-help sections of major
bookstores. Glück’s recent work indicates that she
will survive, too. Marriage and divorce trends will
likely continue to seesaw throughout the coming
decades, but it is doubtful that American society
will ever return to a culture in which broken homes,
unwed motherhood, and living single are given
much notice, much less frowned upon.
Critical Overview
Louise Glück’s work has been well received by critics since the outset of her career. Perhaps to her advantage and to her disadvantage, she has often been
compared to such masters of confessional poetry as
Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. While it may be flattering to be placed among this famous (or infamous)
company, the trappings of the confessional genre
can be as harmful as it is helpful to a writer’s career. Poets who are labeled confessional are often
criticized for too much self-exposure and too much
relation about extremely personal matters. In her
book The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet, critic
Elizabeth Dodd says that “Like Plath and Sexton,
[Glück] writes with angry bitterness about female
sexual or romantic experience in a world where
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women remain primarily powerless.” That may be
the case for many of Glück’s poems, but those in
Vita Nova, including “The Mystery,” describe a
woman pulling herself up from a failed relationship
and dark experiences. Glück also often alludes to
mythological figures and events from legends as
metaphors for her own life or contemporary life in
general. This has been another saving grace for her
otherwise confessional work, and it has helped
maintain a balance between negative and positive
criticism. In The Muse of Abandonment, critic Lee
Upton writes that “the self in Glück is placed in relation to a larger mythological backdrop but is not
overwhelmed by this competing narrative. [It] is
used to dignify the self, particularly the female self,
which might otherwise be domesticated or trivialized.” Thus, in the eyes of some critics, Glück’s
work tends to supercede that of typical confessional
poets. In all, the critical response has been more favorable than unfavorable, particularly toward the
later collections. Writing for the Library Journal,
reviewer Ellen Kaufman sums up the general critical reception to Glück’s work: “Abstract without
being vague, personal without being maudlin,
Glück’s exquisitely crafted work continues to astound. For all poetry collections.”
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill contends that Glück’s poem
begins with an alluring scene and unaffected language but quickly falters into self-pity and sentimentality, robbing the poem of its effectiveness.
The first two stanzas of “The Mystery” draw
the reader in with both the scene they describe and
the method of their presentation. Glück’s simple,
declarative sentences (“I became a creature of
light,” “I sat in a driveway in California,” “I sat in
a folding chair,” and so forth) belie the complexity of emotions that the speaker actually feels. In
these first two stanzas, those emotions are held
nicely in check by the dry candor, soft tone, and
unadorned language with which the poet conveys
them. If only she had maintained that control and
that honesty throughout the work, it would have
been a much stronger poem, carrying high-quality
writing from start to finish. As is, however, it drops
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Subject matter is
only as good as its
presentation. Poets can
address feelings of
helplessness and
vulnerability without using
the language and images of
self-pity.”
quickly off the ledge of good poetry into the abyss
of cheap sentiment, never regaining its initial
foothold.
Whether or not it is fair to place Glück solidly
among the ranks of confessional poets is at least
debatable—some scholars would not think of placing her anywhere else—but “The Mystery” is a
good example of why it may be dubious labeling.
The first third of this poem does not bear out the
typical drama of personal exposure and the misery
of psychological deterioration that most often make
up a confessional poem. Instead, it is almost minimalist, presenting only the information necessary
to let the reader know what is going on. It is as
though the poet is operating like the fictional detective she apparently admires, laying out evidence
and introducing “just the facts.”
The straightforward narrative should not be
mistaken for boring recitation or dull description.
Rather, the story is intriguing. A woman sits in a
likely uncomfortable chair in a bland, at best, location reading a book she has already read nineteen times. Just the setting itself arouses curiosity.
The odd situation is made more complex by the
glimpse the reader is given into the inner workings
of the poet’s mind. Glück finds deductive reasoning “restful,” claiming that “time moves in two directions” as she ponders both the Nero Wolfe mystery and the mystery of her own life. This is how
the poem should continue—soft in tone yet compelling in its intellectual evaluation, personal
enough to be accessible yet impersonal enough not
to be pathetic. Unfortunately, one needs to savor
the poem up to this point because the rest is hardly
palatable.
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Louise Glück edited the edition of the popular
series The Best American Poetry 1993 . She selected poems by thirty poets whose work had
not appeared in the series previously, as well as
poems by seasoned veterans. John Ashbery,
Billy Collins, Tess Gallagher, Denise Levertov,
and Gjertrud Schnackenberg were among her
choices.
• One of the most well known confessional poets,
Anne Sexton was plagued with mental illness
most of her life, eventually committing suicide
in 1974. Diane Wood Middlebrook’s 1991 account of her life and suicide, entitled Anne Sexton: A Biography, is a comprehensive look at
Sexton from a variety of angles: confessional
poet, depressed woman, therapy patient, and
elusive wife and mother.
• Rex Stout’s mysteries, featuring the eccentric
detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie
Goodwin, are some of the most popular tales of
that genre. Stout wrote for over four decades,
beginning in the 1930s, and his “golden” period
is considered by mystery fans to be the early
1960s. Three big sellers from this period include
Too Many Clients (1960), A Right to Die (1964),
and The Doorbell Rang (1965).
• While there are many versions of Dante
Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, a recent translation by
Mark Musa, published in 2000, is one of the
most readable for students not already familiar
with the work. Vita Nuova is a collection of
thirty-one poems set alongside a prose narrative
celebrating and pondering the subject of love.
Musa’s translation includes a critical introduction and explanatory notes.
Beginning with the third stanza, Glück falters
into complaint and self-pity. The line “Fearless
heart, never tremble again” reads as though the poet
has suddenly slipped into the Romantic Age, speaking to her own organ of sentimentality and, thereby,
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drawing upon the most cliché of addresses. The notion of a despairing woman’s heart falling under
the “shadow” of her lost love’s “narrow palm” is
trite, imploring the reader to feel as sorry for her
as she feels for herself. But the moaning does not
end there. While the language of the next stanza at
least returns to the twentieth century, the subject
remains self-pity, with helplessness thrown in for
more dramatic effect. In saying, “My life took me
many places, / many of them very dark,” Glück implies that she was not in control of where her life
“took” her. Instead, she went from place to place,
or from event to event, “without [her] volition,” as
though she was unable to make a conscious decision regarding her own life. Lest the reader should
still not quite get the point, Glück emphasizes her
total helplessness by comparing herself to a baby
in a stroller, being pushed “from behind,” completely at the mercy of powers other than her own.
Or so it seems to the poet, if to no one else.
Not all confessional poets, including Glück,
resort to the shallow tune of self-pity in the majority of their work. Most can make their points
and let their feelings be known by relating personal events and thoughts with simple, unaffected
language and even brutal honesty. Honesty, brutal or otherwise, is preferable to triteness and literary sap. Toward the end of “The Mystery,”
Glück attempts to regain some composure by watering down the pathos with a sudden change of
attitude. She claims abruptly, “And yet I saw
amazing things.” Instead of comparing herself to
a “fishlike baby,” she calls herself “an eager student”—a much more compelling description than
one that attempts to evoke pity. But the poet does
not reveal what “amazing things” she saw, only
that they relate metaphorically to Nero Wolfe
mystery stories and literally to the puzzles she
has encountered in her personal life. This declaration is intriguing, but it is not enough to
save the poem. Glück still alludes to her position
as “clinging” and to her sentiment as selfaccusatory. She seems to try to overcome her own
helplessness in the end and, yet, she is also still
figuring out who she is and what her “purpose”
is. The reader, then, is left with the sense that the
poet’s vulnerability and feebleness are still very
much intact and that she is not particularly determined to put them aside. Here, a psychologist’s
notion of “learned helplessness” is all too attractive to the poet, perhaps gaining her the attention
she feels she needs.
The genre of confessional poetry is a delicate
one in regard to what constitutes good and bad ex-
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amples of this type of verse. On one hand, critics
need to keep in mind that the very nature of confessional writing is just that—to confess something,
and that generally means something personal. With
that in mind, is it fair to attack a poet who has had
the guts (or gall) to expose deeply personal
thoughts, many of which are controversial, embarrassing, sexual, or even shameful? Perhaps the answer lies in looking at the flip side to subject matter: style. Subject matter is only as good as its
presentation. Poets can address feelings of helplessness and vulnerability without using the language and images of self-pity. The first two stanzas of “The Mystery,” for instance, portray a
melancholy scene, one in which the speaker offers
straightforward description of her setting that may
make the reader feel sorrow or sadness without being told to. That’s the key. Good presentation paints
a vivid picture for the reader to consider and respond to as the writer desires, if the picture is not
muddied with pathos and sentimentality.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “The Mystery,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Adrian Blevins
Blevins is an essayist and poet who has taught
at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in
the Virginia Community College System. In this essay, Blevins contends that there is an unfortunate
gap between Glück’s rhetorical and poetic arguments in her poem.
There is sometimes a noticeable gap between
what a poet states to be the truth and what her language indicates to be the truth. This gap has to do
with the ability of language to communicate feeling through rhythm and music and can be either an
intentional strategy or the result of an actual disconnection between thought and feeling. In some
poems, this gap creates ambiguity or irony or both:
if a poem tries to express an idea or feeling that its
language does not support or impose, the reader
might experience the pleasure of irony, which is
the pleasure of the jolt of a collision of opposites.
Such a gap between what a poem says it says and
what a poem’s language implies it says might also
suggest that the poet means not necessarily what
she says, but more than she says. This strategy can
contribute to a poem’s ambiguity, or its ability to
live in two opposing worlds simultaneously. Yet,
sometimes, a gap between what a poet says and
what her language implies she means can undermine a poem’s power since it suggests that what
the mind thinks is not exactly what the heart feels.
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That is, the poem’s
shape or structure
undermines its claim.”
“The Mystery” comes toward the end of
Louise Glück’s eighth book, Vita Nova. Vita Nova
is a sequence about “the painful reconstruction of
the self after divorce,” as the American poet and
critic Kate Daniels says in her 1999 commentary
in the Southern Review. While much of Vita Nova
describes the speaker’s grief in the wake of the loss
of love—a grief she admits in “Aubade,” saying
she “thought [she] couldn’t survive”—many poems
in Vita Nova try to get at the new life suggested in
the book’s title by attempting to move away from
this emotion toward an expression of pleasure in
having survived a seemingly fatal emotion. In the
book’s last poem (which, like the book’s first poem,
is called “Vita Nova”), the speaker says, “ I thought
my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then
I moved to Cambridge.” Thus concludes Glück’s
sequence: the speaker, adopting a variety of mythical personas, moves from the unbearable to something like a state of wonder at having lived through
the unbearable. Glück’s overuse of the declarative
sentence and paucity of image and music are more
useful to her articulation of the numbness of grief
than to her articulation of being “a creature of light”
in “The Mystery.” That is, there is a gap in “The
Mystery” between Glück’s rhetorical and poetic arguments that is neither ironic nor pleasantly ambiguous.
First, the poem’s structure undermines its
rhetorical claim by concentrating too much on the
cause of the speaker’s grief, rather than on the
“light” that comes in its wake. “The Mystery”
moves forward by way of a series of loose associations. In the first stanza, the speaker describes herself as “a creature of light,” reinforcing this declarative or discursive idea with images of
light-colored objects. In the poem’s third and forth
lines, the poet states, for example, that “the roses
[in California] were hydrant-color” and that a
“baby rolled by in its yellow stroller.” This opening suggests that the speaker has moved away from
“the world [that] . . . shattered” in the poem “Formaggio,” for just one example: the light-colored
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images suggest that the speaker has begun to step
into the new life that is the book’s pledge. As the
poem progresses, Glück moves backward from this
notion of vibrant light to a memory of “the very
dark” “places” her life took her, and in so doing
undermines the poem’s main premise.
The speaker tells us in the second stanza that
she “sat in a folding chair / reading Nero Wolfe for
the twentieth time.” This confession suggests that
the speaker is occupied with distracting herself,
rather than with embracing the new life that is hers
to claim. She says that the mystery “has become
restful,” and then makes an abstract statement about
the nature of the innocent that can apply to both
the characters in the Nero Wolfe mystery and in
Vita Nova itself. This focus on the unnamed innocent, and on the idea that “time moves . . . backward / from the act to the motive / and forward to
just resolution” might be meant to describe the
shape of “The Mystery” itself, but it serves only to
point to the idea that someone is innocent and
someone is guilty—a notably dark sentiment. In the
third stanza, the speaker shifts in point of view, addressing herself when she says: “Fearless heart,
never tremble again.” This turning point seems
promising at first since it suggests that the speaker
has realized that her sorrow will no longer attempt
to destroy her. But the images that follow—if they
can be called images—are far too vague to be convincing. Those images about “the only shadow in
the narrow palm’s / that cannot enclose you absolutely” that are not “like the shadows of the east”
are extremely obscure—they are private references
that Glück does not bother to make public.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker says that life
is always “pushing from behind, / from one world
to another.” Again, this image is promising, since
it implies that we are moving from grief to another
emotional state. The speaker claims in stanza four
that this movement “from one world to another, like
the fishlike baby” is formless and “entirely arbitrary.” Although it’s possible that the world is
formless and arbitrary, the image of the baby counters this argument, since a baby is a fairly reliable
“form” of nature. In other words, stanza four is illogical: it makes a discursive statement that its ornamental image plainly negates.
In stanza five, the speaker realizes that “the passionate threats and questions, / the old search for
justice, / must have been entirely deluded.” What
does it mean to suggest that threats and questions
and a search for justice are deluded? Wouldn’t it be
more accurate to say that the person who makes the
threats and asks the questions and searches for jus-
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tice is deluded? Doesn’t the speaker’s unwillingness
to implicate herself imply that she is unwilling to
face the truth that her journey in Vita Nova is supposed to supply? While these lines suggest that a
change has taken place in the speaker—that she’s
able to stand with the world by thinking the past is
arbitrary and unjust, rather than reasonable and
fair—their declarative nature undermine the energy
that such a realization would imply. In other words,
in addition to its lack of logic, stanza five is too abstract and too lacking in music to be compelling. It
reads more like philosophy than poetry.
In the poem’s sixth stanza, the speaker returns
to the poem’s initial premise, saying that she “became almost radiant at the end. . . . clinging to these
simple mysteries / so that [she] might silence in [herself] the last accusations,” which she tells us in the
poem’s final stanza is the universal question, “Who
are you and what is your purpose”? That is, the structure of the “The Mystery” is a spiral: it moves from
the end result of being “a creature of light” backwards to the formless and arbitrary darkness of grief,
then forward again to being “radiant at the end” and
wishing at last to “silence . . . the last accusations.”
It begins and ends in the idea that the speaker is “a
creature of light” —looking at the darkness of grief
from the survivor’s point of view. A spiral’s very
shape suggests a predominate middle, while the
speaker claims that the “light” at the beginning and
ending of her poem is her focus. That is, the poem’s
shape or structure undermines its claim.
“The Mystery” is made up of nine declarative
sentences, one imperative sentence, and one question that begins as a declarative sentence. The declarative sentence can help poets achieve something like an “authority of voice,” since it is by
nature emphatic. That is, people who make statements sound confident. “I became a creature of
light,” ending on a period, is far more emphatic—
far more sure of itself—than “I became a creature
of light”? It is also important to note that the declarative sentence, when it is used unsparingly, is
very flat—it allows for very little musical inflection and intonation. Glück’s use of the declarative
sentence in “The Mystery” is not as effective as it
is in some of the other poems in Vita Nova partly
because the statements Glück makes in this poem
are not supported or reinforced by images or music, and partly because the statements, as we have
seen, are slightly illogical. The effectiveness of images to reinforce statements can be seen in the
poem’s first stanza, where the poem’s only true images reside. The speaker’s claim that she became
“a creature of light” is reinforced, in other words,
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with images of “hydrant-color” roses and the “yellow stroller.” The claims later stanzas make are not
reinforced in this way. As seen in stanza four, the
speaker commands herself “never [to] tremble
again,” but there are no images or music to help us
believe that this command will be heard. Although
the imperative sentence in this stanza is very emphatic, and though that tone is reinforced by a predominance of end-stopped lines, the stanza’s
vagueness—its lack of clarity—undermines the
command’s emphatic tone, suggesting again that
the speaker is not as convinced of her emotional
state as the poem claims. It’s also worth noting that
the empathic nature of the declarative and imperative sentences undermine the muted music in this
stanza and in others: the repeated /w/ sounds in
“shadow,” “narrow,” and “shadow,” in other
words, are hard to hear because of how very flat a
series of declarative or imperative, end-stopped
lines will sound.
Praising the Greek poet Sappho’s “Seizure”
in a recent issue of The American Poetry Review,
the American poet and critic Joe Wenderoth remarks:
In poetic speech, the subject has always implicitly
suffered a blow, and this blow has opened up a chasm
between herself and the loved scene; while it in some
sense represents a dramatic impotence, this chasm
nevertheless births a new power—or, it is perhaps
better said, causes a new deployment of the same
power. Instead of residing in an ability to make her
way through the world, the poet’s power is shifted
toward an ability to stand in, to stand with, the world,
which no longer offers a through.
It is interesting to note that Glück also has a
poem called “Seizure” in Vita Nova and that it is
placed in the book right before “The Mystery.”
Glück’s “Seizure” ends: “And yes, I was alone; /
how could I not be?” and so gets at a fundamental
truth the loss of love should teach, which is that we
are never lost as long as we are alive. In so doing,
it reveals that in some poems in Vita Nova, Glück
does communicate that her power has “shifted toward an ability to stand in, to stand with, the
world.” Yet Glück’s “Seizure,” like Sappho’s, uses
a complex of images from the natural world and
varied sentence type to counter the heavy weight
of this lesson with the beauty of exuberant, rather
than flat, language. The same can be said for the
final “Vita Nova” in Glück’s book. Although the
last lines—“I thought my life was over and my
heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge”—
are as declarative as many lines in “The Mystery,”
they are countered in the poem with the speedy excitement in lines like, “Blizzard, / Daddy needs
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you; Daddy’s heart is empty, / not because he’s
leaving Mommy but because / the kind of love he
wants Mommy / doesn’t have, Mommy’s / too
ironic—Mommy wouldn’t do the rhumba in the
driveway.”
“The Mystery” may attempt to capture the uncertainty of a person trying to forge a new life from
the jagged remains of the old, but its very uncertainty, the lack of resolve or reckoning in the
poem’s language, obscure any sense that the
speaker has progressed into this “new life.” The
poem crumbles under the weight of its own flat tone
and lack of music, and the reader is left feeling that
the poem is an unfinished work—that the speaker
is more interested in convincing herself that she
need “never tremble again” than she is in showing
the reader any insight into the human psyche’s ability to overcome the loss of love.
Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “The Mystery,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Daniels, Kate, “Bombs in Their Bosoms,” in Southern Review, Autumn 1999, pp. 846–51.
Dodd, Elizabeth, “Louise Glück: The Ardent Understatement of Postconfessional Classicism,” in The Veiled Mirror
and the Woman Poet, University of Missouri Press, 1992,
pp. 149–96.
Glück, Louise, Vita Nova, Ecco Press, 1999.
Kaufman, Ellen, Review of Vita Nova, in Library Journal,
Vol. 124, Issue 4, March 1, 1999, p. 88.
Monte, Steven, Review of Vita Nova, in Chicago Review,
Summer–Fall 1999, p. 180.
Upton, Lee, “Fleshless Voices: Louise Glück’s Rituals of
Abjection and Oblivion,” in The Muse of Abandonment, Associated University Presses, Inc., 1998, pp. 119–43.
Wenderoth, Joe, “Withstanding Seizure,” American Poetry
Review, November–December, 2001, pp. 41–42.
Further Reading
Glück, Louise, The First Four Books of Poetry, Ecco Press,
1995.
This collection of the complete texts from four of
Glück’s early books provides a good overview of the
poet’s continuing themes and style. These poems provide the reader with an interesting background to
Glück’s more recent work.
—, Meadowlands, Ecco Press, 1996.
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Most scholars and critics acknowledge that Glück’s
Vita Nova picks up where Meadowlands left off. The
poems in this collection explore the deterioration of
the poet’s marriage, and comparing them to the ones
in Vita Nova gives the reader a stronger sense of how
far Glück has come in her effort to build a “new life.”
—, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press,
1994.
In this collection of sixteen essays, Glück explores
her own work and the theories behind its creation, as
well as the work of other poets. In the “Author’s
Note” at the beginning of the book, Glück claims, “I
wrote these essays as I would poems; I wrote from
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what I know, trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions. Like poems, they have been my
education.”
Phillips, Robert S., The Confessional Poets, Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
More than a quarter of a century has passed since
Phillips published this comprehensive look at America’s most renowned confessional poets, but he wrote
it during the heyday of this genre’s popularity. In it,
he provides a history of confessional poetry, the critical reviews it received, and his own take on a style
of writing that so many readers have found both intriguing and disturbing.
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Porphyria’s Lover
“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared as “Porphyria” in the Monthly Repository in January 1836,
is the earliest and most shocking of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker—or, perhaps more accurately, thinker—of the poem recounts how he killed his illicit lover, Porphyria, by
strangling her with her own hair. He does so to keep
her his forever, reliving his story to justify his actions and preserve the moment of her death. The
simple language and precisely structured form of
the sixty-line poem combined with its asymmetrical rhyming pattern suggest a complex madness
concealed beneath the speaker’s outwardly calm
manner and reasonable tone.
Robert Browning
1836
The poem’s themes of sex, violence, and madness were of particular interest to Victorian readers, who reveled in sensational tales of horror and
depravity despite societal condemnation of all
things immoral, but Browning overturns normal expectations of such stories by presenting the sex between Porphyria and her lover as natural, making
the reader consider the relationship between sex
and violence, and exploring the complex nature of
the speaker’s madness. The result is a study of human nature and morality that poses more questions
than it provides answers. The reader is left wondering, for example, whether to believe the mad
narrator’s account, how to understand society’s
condemnation of sexual transgressions, and why
sexuality is so often linked with dominance and
power. The widely anthologized poem is also considered one of the finest poetic explorations of
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matic poem “Paracelsus” appeared in 1835 to lukewarm reviews. “Porphyria’s Lover” was published
a year later in a small monthly magazine and received scant attention. During the next few years,
Browning wrote several unsuccessful plays and a
difficult, obscure long poem, “Sordello.” From
1841 to 1846, he published a series of poems under the title Bells and Pomegranates, which were
poorly received at the time but that include some
of his best-known poems. Bells and Pomegranates
includes the poems “Pippa Passes” and “My Last
Duchess.” Dramatic Lyrics, in which “Porphyria’s
Lover” appeared untitled with “Johannes Agricola”
under the general title “Madhouse Cells,” was published in 1842, and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics
appeared in 1845. Again, while Browning received
no critical recognition for these works, later commentators note that the techniques developed
through the dramatic monologues during this period—including his use of conversational verse,
rhythm, and symbol—are Browning’s most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major
twentieth-century poets as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
and Robert Frost.
criminal pathology, an early example of Browning’s treatment of the theme of experiencing an infinite moment, an ironic reaction against the Romantic idealization of love, and a work that shows
a skilled use of lyricism to present the complex
workings of a character’s mind.
Author Biography
Browning was born in 1812 in Camberwell, a suburb of London. His father, a bank clerk, had a 6000volume book collection, from which Browning
read widely. Most of Browning’s education came
at home from his artistically inclined, nonconformist parents. It is believed he was proficient at
reading and writing by age five and by age fourteen had learned Latin, Greek, and French. At ten,
Browning attended Peckam School, where he remained for four years. In 1825, he received a volume of Percy Shelley’s poetry and was utterly taken
with it, declaring himself a devotee of the poet. In
1828, Browning enrolled at the University of London but soon left, preferring to read and learn at
his own pace.
In 1833, Browning’s first work, the long poem
“Pauline,” was published anonymously. The dra-
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While Browning failed to garner popular and
critical recognition for his poetry, it won the admiration of the renowned poet Elizabeth Barrett.
The couple met in 1845 and in 1846 eloped to Italy,
where they lived together until her death. Barrett
demonstrated her love for her husband in Sonnets
from the Portuguese, and he dedicated his collection of poems Men and Women (1855) to her. The
volume, which includes the famous monologues
“Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto,” is now
regarded as one of Browning’s best works, but it
received little attention when it appeared; at the
time, Browning was known chiefly as Barrett’s
husband.
After Barrett’s death in 1861, Browning returned to England. The appearance in 1864 of the
collection Dramatis Personae finally brought
Browning critical and popular acclaim. In
1868–1869, he published The Ring and the Book.
The enormously popular work established Browning’s reputation, and thereafter he was considered
one of England’s greatest living poets. His 1880
prose narrative Dramatic Idylls brought him international fame. In the last years of his life, Browning received various honors, including a degree
from Oxford and an audience with Queen Victoria.
He died in 1889 in Venice on the day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published.
Browning is buried in Westminster Abbey.
P o e t r y
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P o r p h y r i a ’ s
Poem Text
The rain set early in to-night:
The sullen wind was soon awake—
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened, with heart fit to break,
When glided in Porphyria: straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by; untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there
And spread o’er all her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever:
But passion sometimes would prevail;
Nor could to-night’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her—and all in vain;
And she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Proud—very proud—at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine,—mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around
And strangled her. No pain felt she—
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee
I warily oped her lids—again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head—which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head!
So glad it has its utmost will;
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling, one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now:
And all night long we have not stirred,—
And yet God has not said a word!
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Poem Summary
Overview
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
The action of “Porphyria’s Lover” unfolds
through the recounting of the events of one night—
culminating in the murder of Porphyria—by the
speaker of the poem. Because the story is not retold to an audience but seems rather to be replayed
in the mind of Porphyria’s lover, it is somewhat inaccurate to refer to him as the poem’s “speaker,”
but most commentators refer to him as such.
Browning masterfully builds up tension in the
poem by gradually revealing to the reader, through
details provided by the speaker, what has taken
place. As it also becomes clear that the narrator is
mad, it is up to the reader to decide to what extent
to believe the speaker’s statements. The poem is a
dramatic monologue told by Porphyria’s lover
(who is never named in the poem), and like other
Browning monologues, what is learned about this
person is to be gained not merely from what he says
about himself but from what he does not say and
from a sense that his depiction of himself may not
be completely trustworthy. The speaker describes
how his lover comes to him one night and he kills
her, and in doing so he preserves their love forever.
And while his portrayal of the situation is designed
to show that his actions are justified, it becomes
apparent that he is not so certain of this. In this
poem Browning offers a complex psychological
study of an insane man who uses reason and argument to explain and make sense of his actions.
Lines 1–5
40
45
50
55
60
The poem opens by setting the scene—it is
raining, and a storm is raging outside—and with it
establishes the tone of the action that follows. The
storm is described in simple, direct language: it sets
in early, it tears down tree limbs, and its force disturbs the calmness of the lake. The storm is also
personified in a way that anticipates the mood of
the speaker. Browning here uses a device called
“pathetic fallacy,” in which something nonhuman
is endowed with human intentions and feelings.
The wind, the speaker explains, is “sullen”; it destroys the trees out of “spite,” and it deliberately
tries to “vex,” or anger, the lake. Later in the poem
the speaker is sullen and he uses his sullenness to
elicit some type of reaction from Porphyria. Also
in these first few lines, it is learned that the events
described are from the recent past; the speaker
refers to “tonight.” The mood of the speaker is
made clear when he explains that he listens to the
storm raging outside “with heart fit to break”—he
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P o r p h y r i a ’ s
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Media
Adaptations
• The Victorian Web maintains a Browning web
page at http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/rb/
rbov.html with links to other interesting sites.
• The audio collection entitled Robert Browning:
Selected Poems (1984), edited by William C.
DeVane, contains a representative selection of
dramatic monologues, dramatic romances and
lyrics, and short poems that are annotated and
are supplemented by an introduction, a list of
principal dates in Browning’s life, and a bibliography.
• Robert and Elizabeth Browning (1998), a video
in the Master Poets Collection, presents an
overview of the lives, careers, and relationship
of these two prominent Victorian poets.
is suffering greatly over something, and the weather
outside mirrors and intensifies his feelings.
Lines 6–15
Porphyria enters the speaker’s cottage, and immediately the tone of the poem changes. In line 4,
the speaker introduces himself as passively listening to what was going on outside, but in his description of Porphyria, he presents a woman who
busily and actively moves around. In these ten lines
in which Porphyria is depicted, Browning uses an
abundance of verbs, which show her as performing no less than twelve actions. However, even as
she “shut,” “kneeled,” “made,” “rose,” “laid,” “untied,” etc., there is no sense that she is in a hurry
or frenzy. Rather, she is in control of her brusque,
purposeful movements, which are emphasized by
the use of monosyllables. Porphyria enters the cottage and “straight,” or right away, gets to work. Her
presence shuts out the cold and storm, again an indication of her strength of personality. Despite the
fact that there is a storm raging outside, there is no
fire burning, and she sets about making one “blaze
up.” From this the reader gets a sense of her forcefulness but also of the speaker’s passive and depressed state, as he has apparently been sitting
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alone in his cottage in the middle of a storm without attempting to warm the place up.
Indeed, throughout the poem, there are clear
contrasts between Porphyria and her lover. She is
described in terms of bright color (her yellow hair,
the fire she makes blaze up, her blue eyes and rosy
face), while he is pale. She is active, he is passive;
she is talkative, and he is silent; she come in after
being with many other people, while he sits alone
and isolated in his cottage. After she makes the fire,
Porphyria rises and takes off her clothes that are
wet and soiled from the storm. The poet makes
clear that it is only after she has put the scene in
order that she approaches her lover. It is learned
that Porphyria unties her hat, lets her hair down,
“And, last, sat down by my side.” The use of commas around “last” further emphasize that she goes
to her lover only after she has set her surroundings
right. She then calls to him.
At least one critic has argued that the portrayal
of Porphyria in these early lines of the poem suggests that she is a vampire, or at least that the
speaker presents her as one to justify his later murder of her. The setting of the poem, this critic suggests, is typical of the traditional Gothic horror
story, as a mysterious lady enters at night during a
storm. Porphyria “glides” into the cottage in the
silent manner of the undead, and she shows her
forcefulness and dominance in her actions before
trying to seduce her victim. The rest of the poem,
it is contended, provides further evidence of the
speaker’s belief in Porphyria as vampire, as he
thinks her gaze weakens him and his only choice
is to kill her, and as he believes that God has not
punished him because in killing the vampire he has
saved his soul. The name “Porphyria,” too, it is
claimed, has links with anti-Christian elements:
“porphyre” designates a type of serpent, Porphyrius
was an anti-Christian philosopher, and “porphyry”
is a type of marble that is sensitive to light in the
same way that vampires are said to be.
Lines 15–30
The speaker does not respond to Porphyria’s
call after she sits next to him. This failure to respond indicates his sullenness; perhaps he is even
in a catatonic state. Interestingly, the speaker does
not even present himself as “I,” and the sense of
his passivity is stressed once more when he says
that “no voice replied” to her calls. Porphyria again
is the active partner, as she puts her arm around
the speaker’s waist and bares her shoulder to him.
She proceeds to seduce him, moving her blonde
hair from her shoulder, pressing his cheek against
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it, and then enfolding him in her long tresses. By
modern standards, this description may not be considered sexually explicit, but in early Victorian poetry this would be considered a daring and erotically charged scene. The fact that the woman
dominates and controls the situation is, of course,
unusual, and this aspect is made all the more
shocking when it is learned in the next few lines
that she is a married woman of a different social
class than the speaker. These facts are not immediately obvious, and the reader only gleans from
several hints offered by the speaker that the two
of them are engaged in an illicit love affair. He explains that Porphyria murmurs to him how much
she loves him. But, he says, she is too weak, despite wanting to very much, to overcome her pride
and follow her desire to be his forever. She cannot “dissever,” or break, her “vainer” ties. However, sometimes her passion overcomes her and
she cannot help but come to her lover. Tonight, for
example, she has left a “gay feast” to be with him.
Thoughts of her pale, lonely lover cannot keep her
at the party, and she has come through wind and
rain to be with him. The fact that she was at a “gay
feast” indicates that she is from the wealthy
classes, and so she has a much higher social position than he, who lives in a cottage. Their love affair would thus be frowned upon because of their
different social backgrounds.
The picture of Porphyria in these lines of the
poem comes as a contrast to the description of her
given earlier in the poem. In lines 6 through 15,
the speaker presented a figure of a strong, forceful, dominant woman. Now, he presents her as being weak and unable to do what she actually
wants—which is to leave her “vainer ties” and be
with him. It is not entirely clear whether in lines
22 to 25 the speaker is merely giving his own explanation of her actions or whether he is offering
a mocking reproduction of Porphyria’s own narration of her feelings and actions that evening. It
is clear that while the earlier portrayal of Porphyria
is offered in objective terms, the speaker now presents how he sees his lover in light of his selfimportance, frustration, and bitterness. Before, the
description was of outward events (the storm, Porphyria’s entrance and action), and now the speaker
turns inward to present a subjective interpretation
of her state of mind and motives. While before she
was dominant and in control, coming to him only
after she has done what she needed to do, in his
mind, she is weak and struggling, torn between the
party’s allure and coming through wind and rain
to be with him.
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Lines 31–42
Suddenly the demeanor of the speaker
changes, and it seems that all is well and he is
happy. But it becomes clear again that what he describes is not presented objectively but from the recesses of his troubled mind. While in the first half
of the poem the speaker is depressed and morose,
it becomes clear in this part that he is in fact quite
mad. It becomes especially difficult to determine
what to believe about the account he offers. He says
that he looks up at Porphyria’s eyes and they are
happy and proud. He “knows” at that instant that
Porphyria worships him. He is surprised and made
proud by this realization, and his feelings intensify
as he decides what he should do. In lines 31 to 36,
the speaker suddenly uses a series of first-person
pronouns: “I looked,” “I knew,” “my heart,” “I debated,” “mine, mine,” and “I found.” He thinks that
at “that moment” Porphyria is completely and utterly his, and not only that but she is “fair / Perfectly pure and good.” It suddenly occurs to him
what he should do, and that thing he finds to do
is to take her hair in one “long yellow string”
and wind it three times around her throat, strangling her.
There is no description at all of Porphyria’s
struggle or horror, and according to the speaker,
she feels no pain. He insists upon this twice. The
reader knows the events cannot have occurred exactly as the speaker presents them, that he gives the
interpretation of those events shaped by his demented mind. The speaker imagines that his lover
who has trouble leaving her social circle to be with
him in fact “worships” him, that she is completely
his, and that at the moment she is with him she is
perfectly pure. He is taken with the perfection of
the moment, and he realizes that what he must do
is preserve it. Killing her is the only way he can
possess her completely. This act, he suggests, is not
to be condemned, since, he insists, his victim feels
no pain.
Lines 43–55
After strangling and killing her, the speaker
opens Porphyria’s eyelids, using a strange simile
that is at once grotesque and oddly innocent: he
lifts her dead lids as perhaps a child would who
opens a flower that holds a bee. Again, her eyes indicate that she is happy: they are laughing and
“without a stain”—an unusual occurrence indeed,
since Porphyria is dead. The speaker then proceeds
to loosen the hair from around Porphyria’s neck
and kiss her on the cheek, which blushes beneath
his caress. Now he props her up and puts her head
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on his shoulder; he points out that this is the same
position they were in before, but now the roles are
reversed, and he bears her on his shoulder. The balance of power, it seems, has shifted, after Porphyria
has “given” herself to him completely and he has
made sure that this will be the case for all time.
The speaker explains that as he utters these lines,
Porphyria’s head is still on his shoulder, smiling
and happy and free of its worries and in the state
in which it has always wanted to be. He imagines
that Porphyria shares in his joy of having stopped
the passage of time in the exact moment in which
her love for him is complete. She is finally free of
all she scorned—perhaps her life in a monied society—and has gained her true love. This strange
and disturbing depiction of what is happening is
made all the more eerie by the fact that the speaker
says that it is Porphyria’s head, drooped on his
shoulder like a flower, that has these thoughts and
feelings.
Lines 56–60
The last five lines of the poem show the
speaker sitting still with his dead lover’s head upon
his shoulder, as he reflects that Porphyria would
never have guessed how her darling one wish—to
be with her lover forever—would finally be
granted. The moment of their perfect love has been
captured and preserved for all time. They have sat
together in the same position all night, not stirring
at all, and this, it seems, is the beginning of an eternity together. Again the speaker tries to convince
himself (or the reader) that what he has done is not
to be condemned, for he says that even God has
not spoken about his act. But he leaves it open that
he is himself not absolutely sure of God’s approval,
as he says that “yet God has not said a word”—
indicating that He might still do so. Once again,
this seems to imply that the speaker, by presenting
or reliving his account of the night’s events, tries
in his demented state to justify to himself, presenting the situation in such a way as to show how
he is not to blame but seeming to feel undercurrents of distress and guilt at his crime.
Themes
Madness
Browning’s study of madness in “Porphyria’s
Lover” is subtly presented. At the beginning of the
poem there is little sense that the person who narrates these events is insane. The form of the poem
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is regular, with a tight ababb rhyme pattern. Most
of the poem is written in an uncomplicated iambic
pentameter, in which every other syllable is
stressed, creating a rhythmically soothing beat. The
diction of the poem is straightforward (most of the
words used are monosyllables), as is much of the
description of events presented by the speaker. The
poem begins with a simple description of a storm
and then moves into a similarly straightforward description of Porphyria’s movements. The narrator
explains everything methodically, presenting a catalog of his lover’s movements, as she shuts out the
cold, kneels down, makes a fire, takes off her coat,
and sits by his side. However, as is soon made clear,
the apparent objectivity of the account and the outward, metrical impression of reasonableness and
calmness belie the psychological upheaval in the
speaker’s mind. As the events of the evening unfold through the speaker’s monologue, the reader
realizes the speaker is not completely in touch with
reality. The sudden shift in the speaker’s perception of Porphyria—she is at first a strong, commanding presence and in the next moment is shown
as weak and indecisive—indicates that actual
events and his interpretation of them are not in accord.
In the second half of the poem, Browning offers more and more clues to show that the speaker
is not merely delusional or confused because of his
near-broken heart but that he is quite mad. Yet all
this is presented, again, in a manner of eerie calm,
even as the speaker describes how he takes his
lover’s hair and twists it around her neck until she
is dead. At the moment of her death, there is no
shift in rhythm (although the language of the poem
does become progressively more metaphorical
throughout the poem), and the detachment with
which her death is reported makes the scene all the
more shocking. At the end of the poem, it is obvious that the speaker has completely lost touch with
reality, but again neither the tone nor the diction
points overtly to his madness. Rather, the reader
gets a sense of his dementia from what the speaker
does not say, from how his depiction of events cannot possibly accord with reality, and from the incongruity of his insistence of his lover’s happiness
with the fact that she lies dead in his arms. Although nowhere in the poem does the poet Browning offer his own commentary on the events that
take place or the state of the speaker’s mind, with
his presentation of Porphyria’s lover’s account of
what takes place, he forces the reader to ask questions about the nature of the speaker’s mind and
madness. By not writing using disjointed language
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or crazy rhyme (the rhyme scheme is rather irregular but follows a very orderly pattern), Browning
suggests that madness is a complex phenomenon
that has more in common with sanity than most
people would perhaps like to think.
Topics for
Further
Study
Sex and Violence
“Porphyria’s Lover” is not an overtly sexual
poem by today’s standards, but its frank depiction
of an illicit love affair between a woman of high
social standing and her poor lover would have been
shocking to Victorian readers. However, Browning’s poem is not shocking merely because it presents a transgressive sexual union but because of
the way it depicts it. Nineteenth-century readers in
England, despite strict societal standards of morality, were fascinated by stories of prostitution, unwed mothers, and torrid affairs, and the newspapers were full of stories catering to the public taste
for scandal. Browning does not just offer the shocking story of an illicit affair but complicates it by
showing the intimacy and complexity of the relationship and by provoking additional emotional reactions in readers when it is learned that the speaker
kills his lover. Browning uses sex and violence in
the poem to pose questions to readers about the nature of immorality. In the poem, Porphyria tries to
seduce her lover by laying bare her shoulder and
putting his head on her shoulder, and he in turn
kills her and places her head on his. Both sex and
violence were deemed “immoral” by Victorian
standards, and Browning seems to be asking why
this is as he shows the two acts mirroring each
other. What makes these two very different types
of acts “wrong” in the eyes of so many people?
Why are sex and violence so intimately connected
and of such interest to people that they continue to
be fascinated with sensational and scandalous stories despite at the same time being horrified by
them?
Dominance and Power
The two characters in the poem are lovers, but
there is obviously a great deal of tension between
them, and there is a sense of the speaker’s unease
at Porphyria’s power. She is clearly more in charge:
she is superior to him socially; she comes to see
him and puts his house in order. She is a forceful
presence as soon as she walks in the cottage and is
able to shut out the storm. The speaker seems to
resent her power over him. For, while he portrays
her as strong and commanding, he insists that she
is weak and needs him more than anything else.
When he kills her, he finally reverses their roles so
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• Compare and contrast “Porphyria’s Lover” with
another of Browning’s dramatic monologues,
such as “Johannes Agricola” or “My Last
Duchess.” What similar patterns do you see in
the writing? What differs in their tone and style?
•
In “Porphyria’s Lover,” what clues suggest that
the speaker’s account is unreliable, that what he
says cannot be true? What would make you not
trust his recounting of what happened?
• Do some research into the psychology behind
crimes of passions. Based on your research, are
crimes of passion only committed by those who
are mentally unstable, or are “normal” people
also capable of such acts?
• Do some research into the way modern U.S.
courts evaluate sexually-motivated crimes. Explain how a modern court would address the
crime and criminal that this poem presents.
What do you consider would be a just punishment for Porphyria’s lover? Explain your answer.
• Assume the identity of the speaker and write the
defense you would use at your trial to explain
the events that led up to the murder.
• Do you think there is evidence in the poem to
suggest that Porphyria is a vampire? If so, what
is it? If not, why do you think this is not a reasonable interpretation of the poem?
• Research the treatment of the criminally insane
in England in the 1860s and their treatment in
the United States in 2002. Write a compare and
contrast essay that describes how the speaker in
this poem would be treated in these different
times and places.
that he is in control; at the end of the poem, she
sits with her dead head drooped on his shoulder,
when before she had lain his cheek on hers. The
fact that the woman is the more powerful partner
in the relationship is contrary to the stereotype, and
this may be the reason for the speaker’s resentment
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and anger. The fact that he cannot control her—she
has a gay social life which she enjoys—is a likely
source of his bitterness, and the only way to rid
himself of his feelings of impotence and powerlessness are to kill her. Again, while Browning offers no commentary on the nature of power in relationships, the poem brings up questions about
how power dynamics manifest themselves in sexual partners’ attitudes and behavior toward each
other.
Experiencing an Infinite Moment
Time plays an important role in “Porphyria’s
Lover,” which is made up of sixty lines divided
into twelve parts using the same rhyme scheme.
The use of sixty lines (reflecting the minutes in an
hour) made up of twelve clock-like sets might be
Browning’s way of emphasizing the significance
of temporality. From the beginning, when he tells
us the rain set in early tonight, the speaker is aware
of time. When he describes Porphyria’s weakness
at not being able to leave her other life behind to
be with him, he insists that she wants to be with
him “forever.” The speaker, in his delusional state,
believes that by killing Porphyria he can preserve
forever “that moment” of their perfect love, and he
feels his action is justified because he has captured
for all time the beauty of their relationship. His replaying of the scene in his mind—and thus the
poem itself—seems also to be an attempt to stop
time and experience forever the moment of their
perfect love. This theme of experiencing an infinite moment (in which the lover experiences a
woman’s perfect love) was common in much Romantic literature, and it has been suggested by a
number of critics that in his poem, Browning parodies this notion by showing a madman capturing
this infinite moment with his gruesome murder of
his loved one.
derstands the situation he discusses. However, as
becomes clear in “Porphyria’s Lover,” much of
what the reader learns about the speaker of the
monologue comes not from the speaker’s own revelations but from what he does not say. The speaker
in “Porphyria’s Lover,” for example, never declares
that he is mad, but the reader infers from his words
that he must be. The speaker also means to convince (perhaps himself) that his actions are justified, but there are clues that he may not actually
feel this way, and certainly the reader can decide,
after considering what has happened, how the
speaker should be judged. One of the most interesting features of the dramatic monologue is that it
presents a situation through the words and thoughts
of a particular character, but then it is up to the
reader to decide to what extent that character’s actual depiction of the events should be believed.
With “Porphyria’s Lover,” the reader must determine by reading between the lines of the speaker’s
account how reliable a narrator he is, how accurate
his portrayal of Porphyria is, what his intention is
in recounting the story, and exactly what is the extent and nature of his madness.
Form
Dramatic Monologue
Language
“Porphyria’s Lover” is a dramatic monologue,
a poem in which a speaker talks to a silent listener
about a dramatic event or experience. Browning is
considered to be one of the earliest and greatest
practitioners of this form, and “Porphyria’s Lover”
is his first poem in this style. The dramatic monologue offers readers intimate insight into the
speaker’s changing thoughts and feelings because
he presents in his own words how he sees and un-
Browning often uses complex classical reference and colloquialisms in his poems, but the content and language in “Porphyria’s Lover” seem
straightforward and easy to understand. Again, the
directness and apparent transparency of what is said
by the speaker seem unusual considering that he is
a madman whose thoughts should be difficult to
analyze. Browning seems to take pains to make the
musings of a criminal psychopath clearly under-
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Style
“Porphyria’s Lover” uses a highly patterned
structure: it is composed of sixty lines of verse divided into twelve sets of five lines each which
rhyme ababb. The regularity of the pattern is contrasted with the unusual asymmetry of the ababb
rhyme, and together they every effectively emphasize the inward turmoil of the speaker’s mind. The
use of iambic pentameter throughout most of the
poem lends it a steady, rhythmic quality, which
again contrasts sharply with the unusually disturbing events depicted in the work. Browning uses the
highly structured form of the poem to reinforce the
speaker’s sense of his own calmness and sanity, as
he speaks reasonably and straightforwardly about
his despicable acts, indicating perhaps that madness is a complex phenomenon that is not always
immediately identified as such.
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standable to every reader. The poem uses simple,
short words. However, there are subtle developments in the poem to suggest the speaker’s unusual
state of mind and his heightening sense of conflict.
At first, the poem relies almost exclusively on
straightforward description as the speaker recounts
the events that have taken place, but as it becomes
clear that the events described are seen through the
lens of the speaker’s madness, the language becomes more metaphorical. In the early description
of Porphyria, the speaker offers a simple physical
description of her. She has smooth shoulders and
yellow hair. But after he kills her, he uses vegetative imagery to describe her—her eyelid is like a
shut bud that holds a bee, her head droops like a
fallen flower, and it is smiling and “rosy”—which
seems to accentuate her total subjection by him.
Browning also uses language in other effective
ways in the poem. For example, the sense of Porphyria’s dominance over her lover and the difference in their temperaments is indicated by the active verbs which initially describe her and contrast
her with the speaker’s passivity. When the balance
of power shifts as he kills her, the speaker reveals
himself as in control, and this shift is accomplished
by his associating himself with action while she lies
passively and silent against him.
Historical Context
Sex and Scandal in the Victorian Era
Strictly speaking, the Age of Victoria should
correspond with the beginning and end of Queen
Victoria’s reign (1837 to 1901), but literary historians generally agree that the Victorian period began around 1830, when many social, political, and
economic changes were taking place in English society. The Catholic emancipation of 1829, which
enabled Catholics to sit in Parliament; the construction of the first railway in 1830; Parliamentary reform in 1832, extending the enfranchise to
the middle classes (now one in five adult males
could vote); the suppression of slavery in the
colonies in 1833; and the beginning of the world’s
first industrial revolution meant profound changes
in the existing social order. However, despite many
positive social reforms, Victorian England was
known also for its repressive attitude toward sexuality. This might have been partly as a backlash to
the notorious debauchery of the Regency period
during the early part of the century. Sexuality in
the Victorian period was seen as taboo, not an ap-
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propriate subject of discussion. But, paradoxically,
while moral purity was the norm in public, sex during the Victorian era was a powerful force in journalism, art, and literature. Sexual scandals were the
subject of numerous newspaper stories, and the
reading public had a voracious appetite for tales of
illicit affairs. “Porphyria’s Lover,” written by
Browning around 1834, during the early days of
the Victorian period, takes on a scandalous subject
that would have been of interest to the reading public that enjoyed shocking and horrific tales of sexual transgression. However, in his poem, Browning does not merely feed his readers’ need for
scandal by describing a sordid crime enhanced by
madness and violence, but shocks his audience
even further and thus forces them to question their
desire for sensational stories that both titillate and
horrify them.
The repression of sexuality in Victorian England, then, had the effect of unleashing a great deal
of discourse about sex. The number of newspapers
in Britain also multiplied during this time, and they
became cheaper and more widely available. This
burgeoning medium generated stories for popular
consumption on a scale that had not been possible
before. The papers’ greater availability, coupled
with increasing literacy, made scandals publicly accessible in new ways. It can be argued that the proliferation of sensational sex scandals in contemporary media has its roots in the Victorian era. The
point here is that the social and material conditions
were met during this period in Western history to
make mass consumption of sensational material the
phenomenon it continues to be today. Unfortunately for women, the double standards used to
judge their sexual behavior in everyday life also
found their way into the scandal sheets, and women
suffered far more greatly than men if they were
even rumored to be misbehaving sexually. A
woman would lose her good name, be barred from
society, and decried as “fallen,” and because she
was usually so completely under the power of her
husband, any transgression on her part could mean
being outcast for the rest of her life. Another reason that “Porphyria’s Lover” is interesting in the
context of Victorian social life is that the poem presents a situation in which a woman dominates an
illicit relationship and the immorality of that relationship is then undercut by the horror of the murder that ensues. In the poem, Browning once again
overturns his audience’s expectations by presenting a twist on a scandalous subject that requires
them to reconsider their attitudes towards sexuality, propriety, and morality.
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1830s: The invention of the steam press, cheaper
paper, and increasing literacy in England results
in the proliferation of newspapers, including a
great number of scandal sheets.
Today: Circulation of tabloids in England such
as the Daily Mirror, that concentrate on scandalous stories, far exceeds that of other daily
publications.
• 1830s: In England, a man has the legal right to
beat and lock up his wife; a woman who leaves
her husband is not allowed even to keep what
she earns; a man may divorce his wife but a
woman must prove cruelty or desertion if she
wants to leave her husband. She is not able to
obtain a divorce.
Critical Overview
“Porphyria’s Lover” was published early in Browning’s career in the first issue of the journal The
Monthly Repository under the title “Porphyria.” It
received little notice upon its initial publication in
1836, and critics were similarly unresponsive when
it was reprinted in 1842 in Dramatic Lyrics together
with a companion piece “Johannes Agricola” under the general title, “Madhouse Cells.” When it
appeared again in 1863 in Poetical Works under its
present title, Browning’s reputation had grown, and
all his earlier poems were more favorably reviewed
than when they were first published, but the work
was not singled out for praise. In Browning: The
Critical Heritage, which includes all major critical
assessments of Browning’s works in his lifetime,
“Porphyria’s Lover” is mentioned but twice, and at
that only briefly and in passing. The English writer
Charles Kingsley writing in 1851 is said to have
disliked it, but an anonymous 1876 critic refers to
it as an example of a good short poem by Browning. In general, in the nineteenth century the poem
seems to have been seen as one of a handful of immature verses written by a young Browning during
a period when he was writing poetry in the con-
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Today: In the United States, statistics show
that women experience more than ten times as
many incidents of violence (including murder)
against them by their spouses or partners than
do males.
• 1830s: In England, middle- and upper-class men
were expected to have affairs, but the slightest
hint of scandal that a woman had a sexual relationship outside marriage meant social ostracism.
Today: In the United States, more men than
women are reported to commit adultery, but
more women than men file for divorce to get out
of bad marriages.
fessional style and developing his techniques of the
dramatic monologue.
In the twentieth century, Browning’s reputation in English literature having been firmly established, “Porphyria’s Lover” was heavily anthologized but presented to be “of interest” by most
critics almost solely by virtue of its being a “murder” poem, an example of Browning’s interest in
criminal psychology and violence, and Browning’s
first dramatic monologue. However, as the critic
Norton B. Crowell points out in his study of Browning’s works, the poem “rarely received the attention it deserves.” Most of the analyses of the poem
were brief and covered single aspects of the poem.
An interesting but largely discredited interpretation of the poem was offered in 1900 by James
Fotheringham, who claimed that the lover in the
poem is dreaming and the entire action takes place
in “wild motions” of his brain. C. R. Tracy’s 1937
Modern Language Notes article, one of the first devoted entirely to a discussion of the poem, argued
that the speaker of the poem is not mad, or at least
no more so that others of Browning’s characters.
Several critics have dismissed the poem as minor
and unimportant. Thomas Blackburn writing in
Robert Browning: A Study of his Poetry in 1967,
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for example, complained that the work is “unleavened by insight,” and Park Honan in Browning’s
Characters regarded it as an “extremely good anecdote” but essentially echoes the sentiments of the
earlier critic J. M. Cohen that the work is a “juvenile and unrepresentative horror poem.”
Recent commentators have tended to see the
poem as more interesting and complex. While they
agree that “Porphyria’s Lover” certainly does not
rank as one of Browning’s most sophisticated
works, they have pointed out the psychological
complexity of the anonymous narrator, seen its indebtedness of earlier works such as John Keats’s
“Eve of St. Agnes” and William Shakespeare’s
Othello, recognized the use of techniques developed by Browning in his more mature monologues,
suggested that the speaker views his lover as a vampire, and noted that the poem is an interesting study
in abnormal psychology that anticipates Browning’s most influential work.
Criticism
Uma Kukathas
Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. In
this essay, Kukathas considers to what extent the
reader should believe the mad speaker’s account
of events in Browning’s poem.
Many readers agree that “Porphyria’s Lover,” is a
poem in which a madman recounts to himself the
events of the night before that end with his murdering the woman he loves. The speaker’s actions
and words—his strangling of his victim with her
own hair and his insistence afterwards that she is
glad at what has happened—surely point to his tenuous grip on reality. However, if the narrator in
“Porphyria’s Lover” is in fact insane, certain difficulties arise. Since his is the only account offered
of what happens that stormy night, it seems that the
reader gets only his version of events and then must
try to figure out from his view how to assess the
situation. But what is the truth in the speaker’s description of the circumstances and what are merely
delusions of a demented psyche? How is the reader
to determine which part of the deranged speaker’s
story should be believed and which rejected as untrue?
One reason the dramatic monologue as a poetic form is so compelling is that it offers a situation told from the perspective of a single character
who, the reader gradually realizes, cannot be com-
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In ‘Porphyria’s
Lover,’ Browning presents
subtle clues to reveal to the
reader the speaker’s
psychotic state, and it is up
to the reader to pick up on
these to make inferences
and recognize what kind of
man the speaker is.”
pletely trusted to present with total accuracy the
events he describes. The reader, then, must be the
judge, both of the speaker’s character and the veracity of what he says. How is the reader to do this?
In “Porphyria’s Lover,” Browning presents subtle
clues to reveal to the reader the speaker’s psychotic
state, and it is up to the reader to pick up on these
to make inferences and recognize what kind of man
the speaker is. That is, Browning offers hints that
tell the reader what can be believed about what the
speaker is saying and that also show the workings
of his unbalanced mind.
The clues Browning provides are of two kinds,
which are used together to show the speaker’s increasingly precarious grasp of what is real. First,
with the structure of the poem, Browning shows the
descent of the speaker into madness that takes place
in three distinct stages. At the beginning of the
poem, the speaker is in a depressed state, but he is
not completely mad. His language and description
of outward events indicate as much. But in the second part of the poem, as he turns increasingly inward, he is seen to be losing touch with reality: he
does not describe outward events but presents only
an interpretation of his lover’s inner feelings and
motives. By the end of the poem, the speaker can
be seen to be clearly mad, as he offers again a description of outward events but in a manner that
could not possibly accord with reality because they
are so colored by his inner perspective. So then,
Browning’s second technique is to use changes in
language to show how the speaker loses his grip on
reality. In the first part of the poem, the language
used is straightforward and descriptive. In the second part, it becomes more evaluative and concerned
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• “My Last Duchess,” published in 1842, is perhaps the most celebrated of Browning’s dramatic monologues. It presents in fifty-six lines
the thoughts of the Duke of Ferrara about his
late wife, but as much is revealed about the
coldness and inhumanity of the duke as about
his gracious and exquisite wife.
• Browning’s early lyric “Johannes Agricola in
Meditation,” which was published together with
“Porphyria’s Lover” in Dramatic Lyrics in 1842
under the general heading of “Madhouse Cells,”
is also a study of madness, in this case of religious mania.
• Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) reconstructs the sensational story of a 16-year-old
Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks who
was tried for the murder of her employer and his
mistress.
• Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and
the Criminal Mind (2001), by Roy Hazelwood
and Stephen G. Michaud, reveals the twisted
motives and thinking that go into sexual crimes.
• Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1992),
by William Styron, describes the author’s own
descent into depression and madness.
with emotion. In the final section of the poem, the
speaker again offers descriptions of outward events,
but this time his language is much more metaphorical, and the description of external events is offered
together with the speaker’s unlikely interpretation
of them. The further the reader is taken into the
speaker’s mind, the clearer it becomes that while
his description of outward events can be taken seriously, his interpretation of them cannot be.
The first twenty lines of the poem consist of almost exclusively straightforward, descriptive
words. Browning uses an extraordinary number of
verbs—over twenty—in this section, and the adjectives he chooses for the most part describe external
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features. The speaker opens by setting the scene, explaining that it is raining, presenting the backdrop
of trees and lake. He is alone in his cottage when
in walks Porphyria. The description that is offered
of Porphyria in the first part of the poem is completely external; it focuses on her actions, clothes,
and body. She kneels down, rises up, unties her hat;
her shoulder is “smooth white,” her hair “yellow.”
The speaker in this first section of the poem does
provide some information about himself, but it is
minimal and concerns not his outward but his inner
state. He is feeling dejected (with “heart fit to
break”) and silent when she calls out to him. There
is a clear sense that he is depressed, but he is still
in touch with reality, as his detailed observations of
his surroundings and his lover indicate.
In line 21, after Porphyria murmurs that she
loves him, the speaker abruptly moves from providing a description of external things to offering
an interpretation of Porphyria’s motives, feelings,
and state of mind. The declaration of love on her
part seems to set him off and now he does not describe her actions but judges them. The second section of the poem, from lines 21 to 40, then, turns
to using language that is descriptive not of external objects and situations but of internal feelings
and thoughts. The adjectives used become distinctly evaluative as the speaker’s thoughts go inward. He explains that Porphyria is “too weak” to
set her “struggling” passion free from pride. Sometimes her love for him overcomes her, as tonight,
when she leaves a “gay feast” to be with him. As
he looks into her eyes, the speaker sees that Porphyria is “happy and proud,” and he realizes then
that Porphyria worships him. The speaker’s interpretation of Porphyria and her actions does not
seem at all to accord with the more objective,
straightforward description of her that he offers earlier. Her actions in the first twenty lines show her
to be strong and decisive, but now the speaker says
she is weak. The speaker also begins to use a great
many first-person indicators, underscoring again
that he is turning inward in his interpretation of
what is happening. He says that Porphyria is “mine,
mine” and then that she is “perfectly pure and
good,” and with that he strangles her with her own
hair. So then, throughout most of this second section, Browning shows his speaker losing grip with
reality as he ceases to offer objective reports of
events but presents subjective evaluations instead.
However, right at the end of the section, when the
speaker describes the act of murder, he again uses
objective, descriptive language, explaining that he
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kills his lover by winding her hair around her throat
three times.
But then the tone shifts abruptly yet again in
line 41. Immediately after he confesses his deed,
the speaker offers his own bizarre interpretation:
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around
And strangled her. No pain felt she—
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
In the entire third section of the poem, from
line 41 through 60, the speaker offers this type of
interpretation repeatedly. He presents a supposedly
straightforward, objective description of an event
but then immediately gives his own, incongruous
understanding of it. He strangles Porphyria, but she
feels no pain. (The speaker even repeats this
thought to convince himself of its truth.) He then
opens her (now dead) blue eyes, and they laugh.
When he kisses her (lifeless) cheek, it blushes, and
her rosy head smiles. The speaker’s madness in this
section has descended into yet another stage, and
the changes in language signal this. In the first
twenty lines of the poem, he is in a depressed state,
but he seems to interpret the outward world correctly with his observations. In the second section
of the poem, the inner workings of his mind show
him to misinterpret his lover’s feelings for him.
Now, in the third section, he misunderstands and
misinterprets even the most obvious external signs
and events. He thinks his lover’s blue eyes are
laughing when they are more than likely wide open
in shock. He thinks that she is blushing when what
may have happened is that his touch has brought
color (in the form of his body heat) to the surface
of her dead face. Also, it is noteworthy that
throughout this third section Browning has his
speaker use far more metaphorical language than
in the previous two sections. In the first description of Porphyria in lines 1 through 20, the speaker
puts forth a catalog of her actions. In this third section, he compares her to a flower: her eye is a shut
bud, and her head is smiling and rosy.
The speaker in the final section no doubt descends into complete insanity, which is made clear
by signs indicating he no longer makes sense of the
external world as he used to. He no longer merely
objectively observes outward events but filters
them always through the subjective, interpretive
lens of his complex feelings for Porphyria, which
are shown in the second section to make him clearly
delusional. However, this is not to say that at the
end of the poem the reader can no longer take seriously anything that the speaker says. What
Browning does in the poem is to present the
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speaker’s descent into madness by showing his increasing movement away from an objective understanding of events. What this seems to indicate is
that the reader can still take seriously the facts of
the speaker’s account (that his lover enters the
room, that he strangles her, that they sit together
all night long) but not his interpretation of them. It
is, then, the speaker’s reading of what has happened on that night that reveals him to be less than
sane. It is up to the reader of the poem, then, to
separate the objective, factual description presented
by the speaker and provide his or her own (necessarily subjective but most likely not tainted by madness) reading of it to better understand the whole
truth of what has transpired.
Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Porphyria’s
Lover,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Barry L. Popowich
In the following essay, Popowich examines the
various meanings attached to the word “Porphyria,” especially that of delusional madness and
its meaning for Browning’s poem.
If one examines such a standby as DeVane’s A
Browning Handbook, or the recent Oxford edition
of The Poetical Works, one discovers no conjecture upon the name in the title of “Porphyria’s
Lover.” While Robert Browning’s poetry is undeniably well annotated, one of his most famous
terms, “Porphyria,” has not been glossed, apparently because its meaning has been taken as clearly
the proper name of a female character. But, while
Porphyria is certainly used as a character name, it
is far from only that. The term resonates of alternate states of mind, for it is the name of a disease
that brings delusional madness to its sufferers. (The
disease also causes purple urine, hence the name
which is based upon the Greek porphryos or purple, a derivative of which, porphyry, Browning uses
a dozen times elsewhere.) I contend that Browning
gained knowledge of this disease shortly before he
wrote the poem, and, because he had seen the delusions experienced by porphyria sufferers, he wrote
the poem to be read in a most unstable way as the
raving memory of an inmate in an asylum. My contention also serves to reinforce the importance of
Browning’s interest in the pathological.
Michael Burduck’s 1986 article in Studies in
Browning and His Circle is in partial response to
the ready acceptance of “Porphyria” as merely a
fanciful female name, as Burduck implicitly notes
the lack of attention given to it. He considers the
possible definitions of the term as he makes a case
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The issue of voice in
this poem is a complex one
of the self and language, of
the poet speaking for
another, if fictional, self,
and of literary history and
context.”
for the poem’s use of a submerged theme of vampirism. Burduck’s research, while helpful, does not
state the obvious, that “Porphyria” seems not to
have appeared previously as a woman’s name. He,
however, usefully comments upon the Gothic atmosphere of the poem, and in a footnote, comes
within a hair’s breadth of what I believe to be
Browning’s inspiration for “Porphyria.” Burduck’s
reference is to a “rare blood disease” called porphyria in which sun-sensitive skin is the main
symptom, and which was a condition treated from
medieval times by the drinking of blood. But what
he seems not aware of is that porphyria as a disease is much more than this, indeed being that
“madness” which George III suffered.
If Browning understood porphyria as a form
of delusional madness, and the speaker in the poem
is then understood as largely or even completely
deluded in his perceptions, indeed likely locked up
in an asylum, the reading of the poem will shift
away from the angle of interpretation proposed by
this quotation from DeVane, which also contains a
reference to an older name for the poem:
It is the opinion of Professor Tracy that the lover in
the poem is no more mad than many others of Browning’s heroes; he remarks that in calling this poem and
“Johannes Agricola” “madhouse Cells” the poet lacking the full courage of his convictions, adopted a convenient method of fobbing off these two poems as
objective studies of mental aberration.
Besides some readers’ wishes to diminish the
possibility of delusion in the poem, what also is
being referred to here is that the title “Porphyria’s
Lover” is actually a late, third title to the work.
Its first 1836 appearance was simply as “Porphyria,” and then its second appearance in 1842
was as “madhouse Cells, No. II” (linked with “Jo-
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hannes Agricola”). “Porphyria’s Lover” was only
added in 1849 as a subtitle, and by 1863 the madhouse main title was dropped. This retitling of the
poem has had the effect of moving the opening
denotation away from the issue of madness to that
of character and relationship, i.e. the “Lover,” and
readers have been led along with this lessened attention to madness in the title to a more literal approach to the speaker’s situation. Unaware that
porphyria likely refers to a disease affecting the
mind, the reader has been resituated from looking
through a cell-door at someone suffering a delusion to an ethereal perspective in a country cottage—quite a large shift, itself indicative of the
power of a title.
The question of just how to take the speaker
in the poem has remained open. Herbert F. Tucker,
Jr. in 1984 wrote on a number of possible motivations for why Browning would present “speakers
in extremis” in dramatic monologue form. One reason involves the anxiety of influence from the lyric,
first-person form of the past generation of poets,
and Browning’s wish to distance himself clearly
from the extremity of the poem’s speaker. Another
reason Tucker proposes is almost the opposite, that
Browning was making an ironic stance upon the
reading public’s overvaluation of the lyrical “I,” as
his mad speakers shattered expectations of what the
private speaking voice in poetry would be like.
The issue of voice in this poem is a complex
one of the self and language, of the poet speaking
for another, if fictional, self, and of literary history
and context. My contention that porphyria first and
foremost meant madness to Browning serves to give
his intention some clarity, but does not seek to answer for his fundamental interest in the chosen
voice, other than to point out yet more definitely his
interest in voices not often heard. Likewise, my seeing the speaker undoubtedly as in delusion in a madhouse helps to answer the question of what Tucker
calls “the complicating factor of dramatic audience,” for by placing the speaker in an asylum, the
situation is altered to that of “doctor” and “patient,”
“keeper” and “kept,” or “observed” and “observer.”
Furthermore, if one accepts Browning’s use of a
form of madness as the name for a woman, there is
to be considered how he links madness and gender,
particularly in the face of the violent end. (The editors of The Poetical Works provide the grisly
sources that Browning drew upon for the murder of
a woman by her “mate.”)
Of course, my argument for extreme instability in the poem’s speaker depends upon the hy-
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pothesis that Browning was aware of the disease
porphyria as a form of madness in the early 1830s.
The history of medical terminology is a most vague
area, but there is enough evidence to afford this hypothesis a high probability. As to the disease itself,
its modern history is recounted in this quotation
from Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter’s fascinating book, George III and the Mad Business,
which traces in retrospect the hereditary disease’s
prevalence through the royal houses of Europe:
Only in the present century did advances in medicine
and biochemistry allow Sir Archibald Garrod to put
forward the concept of ‘inborn errors of metabolism’
to account for a group of disorders in which inherited defects of body chemistry lead to an abnormal
accumulation of toxic chemical substances which
damage the nervous system. Among these is a rare
variety, which was clinically defined only in the
1930s, called the porphyrias, because in attacks the
urine is of a purple or dark colour, either when it is
passed or left to stand. The biochemical lesion is a
disturbance of porphyrin metabolism. These are purple-red pigments which are contained in every cell
of the body and give blood its red colour. In the porphyrias their formation and excretion is greatly increased and they or their precursors appear in large
amounts in urine and faeces. Their excess in the blood
causes widespread intoxication of all parts of the nervous system, peripheral and central. In this group
called variegate porphyria there is, in addition, sunsensitivity and increased fragility of the skin to
trauma.
(Here is the same photo-sensitivity that Burduck noted as vampirish in the line “A sudden
thought of one so pale,” and in the overall gloom
of the setting.)
While this disorder gained clinical definition
only in the twentieth century, its very name was
derived from the much older observation of the
symptom of the purple urine. For instance, in
Dunglison’s Medical Dictionary of 1857, the definition is given:
PORPYRURIA, from “purple” and “urine.” A state
of the urine in which it deposits the remarkable
colouring matter.
PORPHYURIA, Porphyruria.
The observation of this single symptom gave
the name to a complex disease that was to be understood later as a metabolic disorder (which has
alarming frequency in certain populations). Porphyria, then, is not a feminine form of a proper
name, but originally a compound noun, purpleurine.
Even if it took into the twentieth century to define its cause, porphyria as a diseased condition was
observed long before. In the work Porphyria in
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Australia, Roderick McEwin notes of the disease’s
research history:
Scherer showed in 1841 that a substance of bloodred colour, but not due to iron, was present in blood…
The name porphyria first appeared in the literature
in 1871 when Hoppe-Seyler prepared haematoporphyria from blood.
Throughout the nineteenth century, researchers were studying this symptom, and while
these efforts were uncoordinated, there would have
been opportunities for one to come across the term
orally outside of the medical research literature,
particularly for someone as interested in such matters as Browning. The term would have been in use
long before inclusion in a medical dictionary.
It is hard to imagine, even if complete scientific understanding was lacking, that such a “remarkable” symptom would go unnoticed among
relatively numerous “madhouse cell” occupants at
the time. The patients with purple urine would be
ones that would attract attention, for the disease’s
effect upon the nervous system is severe and they
would be far from passive. Physicians studying the
troubling case of George III, now realized to have
had porphyria and to offer a representative example of its symptoms, described his mental state in
the following way:
Dr. Robert Darling Willis summed up the problem
for the parliamentary committee in December 1810:
“I consider the King’s derangement more nearly allied to delirium… In delirium, the mind is actively
employed upon past impressions … which rapidly
pass in succession… There is also a considerable disturbance in the general constitution; great restlessness, great want of sleep, and total unconsciousness
of surrounding objects.”…
… The first asylum doctor who studied George III’s
illness was Isaac Ray… [H]e gave an account of all
attacks from printed sources then available… This attack (1810) closely resembled the others. It was manifested by hurry, restlessness, caprices, indiscretions,
violence, and delusions.
Macalpine’s thesis is that George III had a disease with physical origins, and not an “insanity.”
Such a distinction in definition and cause, however
useful to hindsight’s repairing of a royal reputation,
would not keep any less distinguished patient out
of one of the growing number of asylums of the
time. Unquestionably Porphyria’s lover has a number of the characteristics noted above, and one can
soon place him in a madhouse cell, where he is actually in delirium, fixated upon God and his past
deed, rather than still being at its location. In fact
one might pursue a reading in which the desired
woman is a delusional construct, a product of the
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madness after which she is named; although, when
considering Browning’s sources, I believe the
speaker is intended to be a murderer.
The gap in the absolute proof of my argument
is that in the 1830s there seem to be no recorded
studies connecting the symptom of purple urine
with delusion and violent madness. For instance,
over the earlier period of George III’s attacks
(1788–1820), his discolored urine was often noted,
but not directly related to his delusions. Yet, there
was an explosion in scientific interest in insanity
by the time of his death. Inevitably there would
have been numerous asylum inmates who would
have been exhibiting as an additional symptom the
“remarkable” coloring effects of porphyria in their
often extraordinarily confined cells. And this very
unsubtle symptom had been given the name porphyuria at some point well before the mid-century
(perhaps as Burduck notes even back to medieval
times). In British medical history there is a long if
inconsistent interest both in classification of symptoms, and also in studying urine. As Macalpine related in her book, the “piss prophets” were divining from urine in the seventeenth century. One only
has to believe as probable that Browning would
have visited an asylum (or spoke to someone who
had) and encountered an example of porphyria.
Then one can accept that his use of the term got its
inspiration directly from a form of madness brought
to his attention by asylum staff. Is this sort of excursion or contact, then, an action that can be assigned to Browning with reasonable likelihood?
As to the availability and attraction of an asylum, Macalpine’s book is especially noteworthy for
its analysis of the development of the “madhouse”
in England after the time of George III. In her chapter “The Asylum Era: Acute Mania,” she writes:
When the insane were raised to the status of patients
and hospitals were built for them and doctors took
an interest in ‘insanity,’ a new specialty was
launched, which was later named ‘psychiatry’ or
‘psychological medicine.’
By the middle of the nineteenth century the asylum
era was in full swing.
While the social implications of these institutions are beyond the scope of this paper, I think it
reasonable that Browning would have been especially attracted to such places, indeed fascinated by
what he might learn there. In Donald Thomas’ biography, we learn this of Browning in 1829, several years before he wrote the poem:
In the following spring he withdrew from the university altogether… Soon he was exploring new and
more scientific paths of knowledge, perhaps a cor-
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rective to the prodigies and monstrosities of Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World. He attended the
lectures of Dr. James Blundell at Guy’s Hospital, the
celebrated physician sharing at least with Wanley a
special interest in midwifery.
As Thomas points out earlier, Browning had a
deep interest in new medical developments and in
the medically unusual, likely fueled by his favorite
childhood reading, manifesting in his adult life as
his seeking of the obscure and often unpleasant:
For such ghastliness he had been well prepared by
other items of childhood reading. Chief of these was
Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World: or,
A General History of Man in Six Books (1678).
Among its anecdotes of piety the work contained
much that was grotesque or terrifying. With great relish Wanley devotes chapters to monstrous births or
abortions… To the child’s imagination Wanley also
offered a chapter ‘Of such persons as have changed
their Sex’, including a spirited chapter of a girl who
leapt a ditch, ran screaming home to report that ‘her
Bowels fell out, but exhibited instead ‘the hidden evidences of a man.’ To complete the child’s knowledge of the world there was a formidable section on
torture and execution. He read, for example, a description of how a man might be severed at the waist,
his upper half kept alive on ‘an hot Iron, or Plate of
Copper, that sears up the Veins.’
As W. Hall Griffin has noted, Browning turned
to Wanley for a large number of later inspirations.
Lest one think that this collection of the highly unusual was an isolated influence on Browning’s
uniquely developing curiosity, one can also note
that at one time his father was found dissecting a
rat at his desk in the Bank of England, or that his
sister Sarianna’s favorite reading was the graveyard
humor of Thomas Hood. (Indeed it was a friend of
his father that was the famous Dr. Blundell’s cousin
and led Browning to those surgery lectures.)
Following along in the path of Browning’s interests in these earlier years, he later became particularly concerned with forms of insanity. He was
especially interested in the production of “the Song
of David” by Christopher Smart, supposedly
scratched upon the walls of his cell in Bedlam. This
act of “madness” is referred to in Paracelsus, itself
a work that required much medically-related reading. Thomas outlines most completely Browning’s
incessant interest in such matters as insanity,
phrenology, and criminal mentality. And, in regards to the creative process, Thomas notes how
Browning kept his public self quite distinct from
his private sources of inspiration. Given all this, it
seems more difficult to believe that Browning
would not have visited or inquired into asylums and
madhouses than to accept that he would have.
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Browning was eager to “see, know, taste, feel,
all,” and in this process he came across much that
was esoteric and even macabre. While there doubtless can never be direct proof that with the first title, “Porphyria,” he referred to a distinct condition
of madness encountered in his wide-ranging explorations, which included “madhouse cells,” it
seems more than sufficiently probable that the first
two titles of the work are more useful as a guide
to his original focus than the one by which the poem
is now known. While this awareness may serve to
guide readers concerned with the authorial intention into a yet further destabilized reading of what
to make of that well-known act of love, it also illustrates much of the socio-historical milieu and its
ability to generate such diverse and often disturbing work as Browning exemplifies.
Source: Barry L. Popowich, “Porphyria Is Madness,” in
Studies in Browning and His Circle, Vol. 22, May 1999, pp.
59–65.
Michael L. Burduck
In the following essay, Burduck studies “Porphyria’s Lover” within the context of “traditional
vampire lore.”
For some curious reason scholars have virtually ignored the Gothic features of Robert Browning’s
“Porphyria’s Lover.” In the poem, Browning, familiar with the horror literature of his day (especially the lore lying behind such poems as Keats’s
“Lamia”), creates a dramatic soliloquy in which the
speaker attempts to justify his murder of Porphyria
by suggesting that she was a vampire. Throughout
the work, he selects particulars that reinforce this
view, for if he is convincing that he has killed a
vampire, he believes he can absolve himself of guilt.
The first clue to Browning’s strategy is the
connotations of Porphyria’s name. Three variations
of “Porphyria” known during the nineteenth century shed some interesting light on the poem. According to Murray, the noun “porphyre” designates
a type of serpent, while the adjective “porphyrian”
pertains to the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyrius, a staunch antagonist of Christianity. In his
famous dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines “porphyry”
as a variety of marble that is extremely sensitive to
light. Collectively these meanings conjure images
of the undead. First, the snake suggests consummate evil and deadly, dagger-like fangs. In addition, the bloodsucker of legend despises all Christian symbols and reacts adversely to sunlight.
Along with the significance of Porphyria’s
name, Browning has his narrator carefully select de-
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The narrator actually
believes that The Creator
refuses to punish him
because he has saved his
own soul, as well as
Porphyria’s, by dispatching
one of hell’s voracious
minions.”
tails that suggest a vampiric view of Porphyria. The
speaker opens his narration in the traditional Gothic
manner as the mysterious lady enters at night during a storm. One can also speculate that the lover’s
weakened condition—“I listened with heart fit to
break”—makes him the perfect prey for Porphyria’s
promises of eternal life and devotion. Next he analogizes her moving into the room to that of a serpent:
“When glided in Porphyria.” Typically, according
to the narrator, she relies on a form of silent movement employed by the undead. She seems to command the storm to cease and the fire to blaze:
“straight / She shut the cold out and the storm, /
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate / Blaze
up, and all the cottage warm;”, thereby demonstrating some of her powers. In line 12 the narrator
mentions her “soiled” gloves. Obviously they have
been sullied by the rain, but the speaker’s word
choice suggests that they carry the blood stains of
her previous victims. Sexual advances constitute
part of the vampire’s arsenal; and as the narrator recounts it, Porphyria seductively bares her shoulder
as she tries to seduce the speaker, who refers to himself in lines 28–29 as “one so pale / For love…”
Does he not suggest his discoloration results from
her having previously drained some of his blood?
Tradition maintains that a vampire’s glance can lure
a victim into a spell from which he has little chance
of escape. Looking into her eyes, the lover becomes
surprised as he feels his ability to resist weaken.
Here he hints that she had supernatural power over
him and thus he was not responsible for any ensuing actions. He suggests he is left with the two traditional alternatives: succumb to her seductions
(which will make him one of the undead) or kill her.
The speaker resolves the dilemma mentioned
in line 35 (“I debated what to do”) in lines 37–38
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with the words “I found / A thing to do…” At this
point he tries to indicate that he rose to heights of
heroics to slay her. His willpower triumphs, and he
destroys the predacious creature. The method used
to subdue Porphyria combines two procedures for
eliminating vampires. When he strangles her with
her hair, he performs a type of quasi-beheading.
Also, according to legend, a vampire can be killed
with a part of its own body. After the speaker slays
Porphyria she appears curiously refreshed, just like
the preternatural creature of lore once the vampire
hunter relieves it of its unholy burden. Lines 56–57
(“she guessed not how / Her darling one wish
would be heard.”) show how the lover claims he
demonstrates his love not by falling into Porphyria’s trap as she had hoped but by destroying
her. Browning’s irony in the concluding line (“And
yet God has not said a word!”) becomes clear. The
narrator actually believes that The Creator refuses
to punish him because he has saved his own soul,
as well as Porphyria’s, by dispatching one of hell’s
voracious minions.
“Porphyria’s Lover,” then, is an early example
of the self-deluded narrator and the dramatic irony
that Browning would develop later in such poems
as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Although “Porphyria’s Lover” has been interpreted
from numerous vantage points, studying the work
in relation to traditional vampire lore might possibly offer an interesting, though exploratory, alternative reading.
Source: Michael L. Burduck, “Browning’s Use of Vampirism in ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’” in Studies in Browning and
His Circle, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 63–65.
Steven C. Walker
In the following essay, Walker examines how
Browning is able to fuse diverse elements into “poetic coherence” in “Porphyria’s Lover.”
The young Robert Browning manages remarkable
mileage from nine sentences worth of the distracted
reflections of “Porphyria’s Lover.” The poem is at
once a murder shocker featuring a madman strangling a comely blond, a sociologist’s case study of
inability to communicate in a sexual relationship,
a glimpse at the impact of artificial social values
upon individual lives, a presodium pentathol excursion into the mind of an apparently motiveless
killer, a convincing speculation as to why all men
destroy the thing they love. Browning’s fusion of
such diverse forces into poetic coherence, let alone
a compelling work of art, poses an intriguing problem in literary dynamics.
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The only clear source in “Porphyria’s Lover”
of this surprising poetic resilience is the source of
its flaws: Browning allows his intense interest in
human dynamics to decrease the priority of the ordering formal aspects of his poem. Such subordination of form tends to artistic blunting—in this
poem occasionally to chaos—but at the same time
frees the poet to concentrate upon seeing rather than
upon expressing prior judgment. Browning plays no
favorites; the tenacious ambiguity of the poem
demonstrates the balanced sympathy generated for
the opposing characters. We are as shocked as we
are empathetic with Porphyria’s strangler. We share
his tenderness for Porphyria at the same time we
recognize her greed in grasping for the best of both
worlds. The very madness advertised in the “Madhouse Cells” title becomes a moot question: Though
the Lover’s behavior is clearly antisocial, his motives for that behavior are not easily condemned.
Browning’s noncommittal stance and resulting psychological acuteness usher us into a credible, dynamic, uncomfortably unresolved poetic world.
Thus from forced suspension of judgment
Browning generates tensions which energize the
poem. “Porphyria’s Lover” is a struggle from its introductory storm to the unresolved ambiguity of its
final line. Structurally, the poem is a juxtaposition
of antitheses. The most apparent of its many dilemmas is the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of
Porthyria and her lover, “lovers” satisfied neither
with union nor with separation: They can’t live
without each other; they can’t live with each other.
Browning dramatizes the ambivalence of their
relationship by personality contrasts—she is a collage of “yellow” and “blue” and “rosy” color, he
is “so pale”; she initiates almost all the action of
the poem, he is catatonically passive; she is talkative, he silent; she reflects the norms of society and
its “gay feast,” he is the isolated individual in his
“cottage.” The paradox of the lovers’ total misunderstanding of each other underscores these constant contrasts. Much is made in the poem of inability to communicate, of inadequate listening, of
failure to answer—he listens “with heart fit to
break”; for her, “no voice replied.”
Sexual conflict intensifies the friction of the
communication gap. The female at first dominates,
approaching the man, carrying the conversation,
initiating the lovemaking. The Lover’s perception
of her as indecisive, as “too weak,” is pathetically
typical of his projection of his own inadequacies.
Her aggressiveness penetrates even the diction;
there are more verbs in the Porphyria passages, and
they are significantly more active.
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The poem pivots upon male assertion of dominance. The ardor of the battle for power is evident
in the man’s satisfaction in the ascendant role: “this
time my shoulder bore / Her head.” The sudden
lurch to trochees from previously steady iambs signals the shift of power, and the vegetative imagery—the “shut bud,” the “rosy” head which,
flower-like, “droops”—underlines her total subjection. Male-female confrontation sparks considerable sexual tension. As its title hints, the poem
could be read as a sensually rhythmic accelerando
to the climactic fulfillment of a literal dying; Porphyria’s disrobing stimulates a vigorous movement
of clauses passionately accelerating to the ejaculatory rhythm of “mine, mine, fair / Perfectly” and
its metrically and syntactically satiated aftermath.
The frictions between Porphyria and her lover
are multiplied by vacillation within his mind, vacillation made visible as he projects his moods upon
the environment. His alternating visions of storminess and warmth approach manic depression in
their drastic divergence. The poem begins in the
“cheerless” atmosphere of a wet, windy storm,
thereafter shifting precipitously between this
“sullen” mood and the warmth surrounding Porphyria, her “yellow hair,” the fire she causes to
“blaze up,” and the whole overflow of laughter she
brings with her from the “gay feast.” The very diction softens when Porphyria is viewed; liquids and
sibilants, overwhelmed by harsher consonants in
stormy parts of the poem, predominate three to one
near Porphyria.
Beneath these rhythmic tensions, the poem
pulses with the systole and diastole of reasoned
madness. Browning rejects the temptation of writing crazily to portray insanity. The poem is formally regular—especially for Browning. Over
three-fourths of its uncomplicated iambic tetrameter lines are unvaried. Diction, 85% monosyllables,
is sanely simple. Tight ABABB rhyme pattern
starches the regularity. Even syntactically, “Porphyria’s Lover” is far less elliptical than “Fra Lippo
Lippi,” far less convoluted than “Andrea del Sarto.”
The metrical impression is one of calm, methodical reasonableness, and it is significant that the reasonableness approaches total detachment during
the strangling itself. Rigid regularity provides a
solid background for the counterpoint of psychological chaos, at the same time reflecting the obsessive care with which the Lover strives to repress
aberrant impulses.
The structural conflicts of “Porphyria’s Lover”
proliferate through the prism of Browning’s narra-
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L o v e r
Browning’s
noncommittal stance and
resulting psychological
acuteness usher us into a
credible, dynamic,
uncomfortably unresolved
poetic world.”
tive perspective. The Lover’s insight, the focal center of the poem, varies widely in depth, from
naively superficial naming of emotions, through
revelation projected in his perception of the external world, to penetrating clues of characterizing
thought patterns. The poem moves from a wideangle perspective of the storm to a close-up of Porphyria disrobing, from the almost tactile intimacy
of the strangulation to the broad philosophical perspective of “And yet God has not said a word.”
This complex central point of view is further
refracted by reader reaction. The Lover’s language,
not so much the language of thought as the more
associative language of conversation, invites reader
response. By partly talking to himself, partly addressing an individual listener, and partly appealing for sanction to a metaphysical system, the
Lover forces the reader to view his position from
those varying perspectives. Browning exposes us
to the interior of a value system with which we partially identify and yet whose very sanity we question, thus altering our viewpoint from that of curious bystander to that of confidant, then double,
perhaps psychiatrist, even God.
Illuminating and yet further complicating the
whole spectrum of the poem’s point of view is the
evaluative control of Browning himself. That control, usually imperceptible, becomes pointed in the
poet’s acute application of dramatic irony: “As a
shut bud that holds a bee,” for example, portrays
the projected hostility of the Lover as tellingly as
it describes the grotesqueness of Porphyria’s condition. Browning’s multifaceted viewpoint subtly
explicates through ironic refraction of perspective.
But the ultimate control of the poem, the power
which prevents the centrifugal force of its complex
and shifting points of view and tensions from im-
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P o r p h y r i a ’ s
L o v e r
pelling it off the page, is focus in time. The poem’s
conceptual heart is an attempt by Porphyria’s Lover
to prolong the ideal moment, “that moment” when
“she was mine, mine, fair / Perfectly pure and good.”
The very line, dragging its spondaic feet, seems loath
to pass. From the initial time reference—“early” in
the first line—to the “now” and “yet” and “all night
long” which in the final three lines become static
equivalencies, the entire movement of the poem is
a striving to stay the external moment.
The structure itself is almost graphically temporal; the poem contains exactly sixty lines comprising a clocklike twelve stanzas. Its iambic tetrameter beats as regularly as a metronome. Concern with
transcending time is emphatically stressed. “For
ever,” in line 25, stands at the climax of one of the
five-line stanzas, receiving the full force of its triplet
of rhyme and standing out further as the only feminine rhyme in the entire poem, its additional syllable propelling its rhythmically out of time. Thus the
formal weight of this central line, “and give herself
to me for ever,” underscores the fervor of the Lover’s
longing for an eternal present with Porphyria. The
Lover, like the poem, strives to extend infinitely
“that moment she was mine.”
And he succeeds. His strangulation of Porphyria terminates time not only for her, but for himself. Upon attaining the finality of “that moment,”
the poem strives for stasis. Terminal punctuation
of clauses doubles in frequency, braking the syntax. A crescendo of “again”s, “once more”s, “as before”s, and “still”s hallmarks the timelessness of
the “all night long” in which Porphyria and her
Lover “have not stirred” and God has indicated His
eternal changelessness by not saying a word. The
poem has become a paradigm of the artistic paradox of attempting to enrich life by arresting it in
static form.
Thus Browning molds “Porphyria’s Lover”
into a lens of a moment, focusing the entire raw
power of his poetry through that moment. It is the
intensity of the temporal focus which unites the disparate moods and methods of the poem, concentrating otherwise dissipative forces into an explosive proximity. The moment is everything; the
moment of the poem, like the Lover’s endless moment, unites past and future in a perpetual present,
and captures motive, action, and consequence
within the framework of immediate psychology.
Browning, like the Lover, succeeds in maintaining
his moment by transfixing it. In that success lies
the vitality of the poem. “Porphyria’s Lover” is an
amalgamation of structural irresolution, viewpoint
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wavering between nebulousness and didacticism,
and psychological inconsistency wandering from
objectivity to sentimentality made poetically compelling by suspension within an artistic moment.
Source: Steven C. Walker, “‘That Moment’ in ‘Porphyria’s
Lover,’” in Studies in Browning and His Circle, Vol. 7, No.
2, Fall 1979, pp. 70–74.
Sources
Blackburn, Thomas, Robert Browning: A Study of his Poetry, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967.
Cohen, J. M., Robert Browning, quoted in Park Honan,
Browning’s Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique, Yale
University Press, 1961, pp. 28–30.
Crowell, Norton B., A Reader’s Guide to Robert Browning,
University of New Mexico Press, 1972.
Fotheringham, James, Studies in the Poetry of Robert
Browning, Paul, Trench, 1887.
Honan, Park, Browning’s Characters: A Study in Poetic
Technique, Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 28–30.
Tracy, C. R., “Porphyria’s Lover,” in Modern Language
Notes, Vol. 52, No. 8, December, 1937, pp. 579–80.
Further Reading
Curry, S. S., Browning and the Dramatic Monologue,
Haskell House, 1965.
Curry claims that Browning invented a new language
with the dramatic monologue, which might account
for why critics were slow to embrace his work.
Dupras, Joseph, “Dispatching ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’” in Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, edited by Charles Moran and Elizabeth F.
Penfield, National Council of Teachers of English, 1990, pp.
179–86.
Dupras expresses the difficulties he encountered in
teaching “Porphyria’s Lover” to his students and explains that when a teacher forcefully determines a
poem’s “meaning” to other readers, the poem dies.
Pearsall, Robert Brainard, Robert Browning, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974.
Pearsall provides a straightforward account of
Browning’s career as a whole and attempts to say
something useful or interesting about every book and
every poem that Browning published.
Sutton, Max Keith, “Language as Defense in ‘Porphyria’s
Lover,’” in College English, Vol. 31, No. 3, December,
1969, pp. 280–89.
Sutton shows how this poem spoken by a madman
extends the reader’s awareness of how the mind
works and reveals what madness is like by following the speaker’s train of thought.
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Rusted Legacy
Adrienne Rich published “Rusted Legacy” in the
literary journal Sulfur in 1997. The poem appeared
two years later in her poetry collection Midnight
Salvage, in which the poet declared she tried, at the
end of the century, “to face the terrible with hope,
in language as complex as necessary. . . . to write
. . . for readers . . . finding their own salvaged beauty
as I have found mine.” The poems meditate on political ideas and events from the twentieth century
and attempt to “salvage” hope from the fear, violence, and despair that have characterized that period of history. Like the other poems in the volume, and as with much of Rich’s work since the
1960s, “Rusted Legacy” fuses the political and the
personal. In the poem, the speaker looks back on
political events and attitudes of another time and
place and laments the decay of once powerful ideas
and ideals, exploring the effect of those views on
society and on her personally.
“Rusted Legacy” is an intense and difficult
work, one that does not lend itself to straightforward interpretation. The poem’s action is often perplexing, and the images used are obscure, rooted
as they are in Rich’s personal experiences. The
piece seems to denounce political repression, comment on the withering of principles, and explore
sexual roles, but this sense is derived not from any
sustained statement or explanation by the poet but
from the mood and scattered thoughts presented in
the work. Rich has been faulted for her grim intellectualism and inaccessibility, and these characterizations may well be said to apply to “Rusted
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Adrienne Rich
1997
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Adrienne Rich
Legacy.” However, for all its complexity and
gloomy obscurity, the poem also bears the hallmarks of Rich’s finest work, with its musicality of
language and ability to elicit emotions using stark,
disconcerting imagery.
Author Biography
Rich was born in 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland, to
a well-to-do family. Her father was a physician,
and her mother had aspirations of being a professional composer. Rich was homeschooled until the
fourth grade and began to write poetry at an early
age. After high school, she attended Radcliffe College, where she studied and was influenced by the
work of the dominant male poets of the time:
Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. She
graduated in 1951, and that year, she published A
Change of World, her first book of poetry, which
Auden selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award
and praised generously. In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist. Over the next
six years the couple had three sons. Rich’s poetry
during this time, for example in her 1955 collection The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, continued in the male-centered tradition she learned
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as an undergraduate. However, Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law (1963) began to reflect her growing political involvement and interest in women’s
social and political roles. In 1966, Rich moved to
New York and became involved in activities
protesting the Vietnam War. Her political views
became apparent in her work, and her poetic style
began to change. She broke from the tight form
and metrics of her early works and produced poetry characterized by greater improvisation. Examples of this change were seen in Necessities of
Life (1966) and Leaflets (1969).
In 1970, Rich left Conrad, and later that year, he
committed suicide. Her work continued to become
increasingly political and her style more urgent. In
1974, Rich received the National Book Award for
Diving into the Wreck but rejected it and instead
wrote a statement accepting it in the name of all
women. In 1976, Rich published Twenty-One Love
Poems chronicling her lesbian relationship, which
she has since explored in her other work. Rich’s other
books of poetry include The Dream of a Common
Language (1978), The Fact of a Doorframe (1984),
and Time’s Power (1989). Over her career, Rich has
also published widely in literary magazines. “Rusted
Legacy,” for example, first appeared in the journal
Sulfur in 1997 before being collected in Midnight Salvage, Poems 1995–1998 (1999).
In the early twenty-first century, Rich enjoys
a reputation as one of the most distinguished American poets of her age. She is known for her commitment to liberal political causes as much as for
her prolific literary output. In addition to more than
sixteen volumes of poetry, she has published four
books of nonfiction prose. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and Japanese. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly
Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for
Poetry, the Lambda Book Award, the Poet’s Prize,
the MacArthur Fellowship, and, the Dorothea Tanning Prize of the Academy of American Poets. In
1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts in
protest of government policies that foster social inequity. She has lived in California since l984.
Poem Summary
Overview
Readers expecting a clear message, argument,
or narrative from “Rusted Legacy” will be disappointed. Like many contemporary and “postmod-
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ern” poems, the work pushes the limits of normal
speech and communication and offers ideas that are
arcane, complex, and impossible to articulate using
ordinary language and linear narrative. In the poem,
Rich presents a series of images that seem to be
disjointed, and there is often no clear sense of how
the poem hangs together. There are also what seem
to be personal reflections and references that are
not explained. All these elements together seem to
emphasize the idea that there are, in fact, no easy
responses or analyses of the situations that are referred to in the poem—or to life in general. What
seems to be suggested by this style of writing is
that poetry is another complex human response to
events and attitudes and to distill these experiences
and ideas into neat, digestible, and pithy statements
gets no closer to a genuine exploration or comprehension of them. Thus, the poem makes the reader
work hard, to think about what is going on, to make
connections, to call up emotions, to go down a
number of different avenues of thought, even to admit to being confused in order to be engaged with
the poem. Even so, it seems that the reader will be
left wondering about many of the references made
and what the poem ultimately “means.” However,
that one does not “get” the poem fully does not indicate a failure on either the part of the poet or the
reader. The experience of the poem itself is rewarding, and part of the strength of this particular
work is its ability to elicit highly individualized responses and interpretations from readers. The following “summary” of the poem, it should be kept
in mind, is also but one response to the poem, and
there are other ideas lurking within it that will be
summoned up by other readers, which might yield
conflicting but equally legitimate interpretations of
the work.
Title
The plot or action of “Rusted Legacy” is difficult to decipher, but the title gives some indication of what the poem’s main theme or intention
might be. A “legacy” is something (often a gift)
that is transmitted from the past. This legacy or
thing from the past that the poet speaks of is
“rusted,” indicating that it is in some state of disrepair or decay. It was presumably once strong (as
suggested by the metal imagery), but the years have
diminished its sturdiness and shine. Reading
through the rest of the poem, it seems likely that
the “legacy” the poet speaks of is an ideological
one, a set of beliefs or ideals that were once vibrant
and powerful but are no longer the force they once
were. Various images in the text of the poem sug-
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Media
Adaptations
• The Academy of American Poets maintains a
Rich web page at http://www.poets.org/poets/
with links to other interesting sites.
• The audiobook Adrienne Rich (Voice of the
Poet) (2002) features Rich reading from and
talking about her work.
gest that the poet is looking back at a place and
time in which she (and others) held certain ideals
dear. Her opponents (those in authority) did not embrace her views, but they were important to the poet
and her associates. There is also a suggestion that
the ideals held by those she opposed (the authority
figures) have similarly decayed. Various ideas or
ideals from the past, then, are now seen by the poet
to have degenerated; the legacy of that previous
time is “rusted,” and the poem meditates on and
grieves this state of affairs.
Stanza 1
The first stanza opens by asking the reader to
“Imagine a city.” The reader is thus brought in immediately as an active participant in the poem. It
is not clear from the first line whether the city the
poet speaks of is a real city or imaginary city. The
poet then describes what seem to be very personal
experiences from life in that city. Still addressing
the reader, she says that in that city nothing a person does is forgiven, and one’s past deeds stay with
a person like a scar or tattoo. But, strangely and
paradoxically, while deeds are not forgiven, they
are forgotten. The sense conveyed is that the reader
has an intensely personal connection to the city and
that the city is some sort of authority figure over
her, a parent-figure perhaps.
The images used in the stanza are strange and
suggest a number of possibilities. The poet says that
almost everything is forgotten but then proceeds to
list a series of memorable events. There is a deer
flattened after it leapt across the highway looking
for food. This seems to be an image that suggests
wide-eyed innocence and a sudden, violent death
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that was unexpected in the course of doing something as basic as looking for sustenance. The poet
then refers to “the precise reason for the shaving
of the confused girl’s head.” This might be a reference to the shaving of young women’s heads in
France during World War II as a sign or “brand”
(echoing the references to “scar” and “tattoo” earlier in the poem) that they were “collaborators” who
had relationships with German officers. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the shaved head
of a woman often symbolized the fact that such
branding of women did not recognize the complexity of female political and social roles in society. Thus, a shaved head for a woman is a sign of
political protest, and perhaps here, the poet suggests a young woman (herself?) who is serious
about her political beliefs but also confused about
them in some way. The image that follows of the
young boys pushing frogs is another violent image,
but one that is strangely universal. All young boys,
it seems, kill things for pleasure in this way. This
of course makes the violent act no less disturbing.
The poet returns to talking about the city. It is
a city that does not remember but yet is intent on
retributions, or vengeance, for what has been done.
What is the city intent on retributions for? Perhaps
the political ideologies that it did not agree with,
the defiance of authority on the part of those whose
deeds adhere to them like scars? The poet again
asks the reader to imagine the city, this time its
physical appearance (its architecture) and political
organization (its governance), including the men
and women in power. Then, after asking the reader
to imagine this city and presenting what seem to
be references that are personal to her, the poet talks
to the reader as though the reader has been a part
of that city: “tell me if it is not true you still / live
in that city.” The poet and the reader seem to have
merged into one person. The poet is remembering
a city or place (or a state of mind) whose ideology
was contrary to hers. It is a city that is at once imaginary and also a place or a state of mind that the
poet has never left.
Stanza 2
The city the poet asks the reader to imagine in
the second stanza seems to be the same city but it
has very different characteristics. The imagery in
this stanza is, among other things, religious. The
poet asks the reader to imagine a city that is partitioned. This could be a city anywhere—in the Middle East (Jerusalem), where Israelis and Palestinians are forced to live in separate settlements, or in
the United States, where many cities are divided so
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distinctly between sections where rich and poor reside. The city is described too in surreal terms.
Temples (religious gathering places) and telescopes
(suggesting that there is no privacy, that the residents are being observed constantly), the poet says,
“used to probe the stormy codices.” Again, the latter is a religious image (a codex is a religious or
spiritual law; “codices” is the plural form of the
noun). It is not clear whether “used” indicates the
past tense or whether the temples and telescopes
are used to probe the stormy codices. Then too, the
idea of “stormy codices” is puzzling.
The city is “blind” in some sense, as it is
“brailling through fog”; the use of the noun
“braille” (the script used by blind readers) as a verb
together with “fog” offers another strange picture.
The city, it seems, is a place of confusion and political repression (suggested by the “twisted wire”
so common in prisoner-of-war camps). It is dark
but there is something sensuous and inviting (its
“velvet dialectic”) about it, perhaps in a false way.
The city is corrupted, its rivers the same as its sewers. There is a great deal of water imagery in this
stanza. The poet talks about art’s “unchartered
aquifers,” indicating perhaps that the city has neglected this aspect of civil life. The source or
“springhead” of the water is in municipal gardens
that are left unlocked at night. All this water imagery, much of it mysterious, seems to indicate a
city that is deluged and out of control. Water is normally cleansing and rejuvenating, but this water is
not. The water might also indicate tears.
The second half of the stanza shifts in tone,
and suddenly the poet seems to be transported to a
very particular time and place. She is “under the
pines” (apparently in one of the city’s unlocked municipal parks) at night while “arrests” are going on.
She is fingering glass beads that she has strung.
The beads (and arrests) might be an indication that
this is the 1960s (when many young people wore
beads), and the poet is at some type of protest or
demonstration. That she is fingering beads (like a
rosary) also reinforces the religious overtones of
the stanza. She says she was transfixed from head
to groin (which is unusual because this means her
legs can move), and she wanted to save what she
could—but there is no indication of what this might
be. Then she says that “they” (with little clue as to
who “they” are) brought little glasses of water into
the dark park. They did this before they “gutted”
the villages. Perhaps “they” are the authorities (police), who after their somewhat human gesture of
bringing water for the demonstrators proceeded to
destroy and do violence in response to the demon-
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strations. Then the poet ends the stanza by saying
that “they” too were trying to save what they could.
Maybe what she is suggesting here is that both the
protestors and the authorities were acting according to their beliefs, each group doing what they had
to do. The stanza ends echoing the last line of the
first stanza, asking the reader if this is not the same
city. Once again, it seems that the poet is looking
back at the past but recognizes that in some ways
things have not changed very much at all.
returning to the city and her mother; she is a faithless daughter “like stone.” But she has water pleating across her, implying that perhaps she can do
something positive and make the changes that will
make some difference to the city. Again, the stanza
ends with the refrain echoed from the first stanza,
as the poet asks if this is the same city. The city is
the same, but in many ways it seems very different since it is in such a state of decay.
Stanza 4
Stanza 3
The poet now moves to speaking entirely in
the first person, and it is clear that the city is a place
she knows intimately. She says she has forced herself to come back to this place like a daughter who
must put her mother’s house in order—presumably
because her “mother,” the city, is old and diseased
or dead. So then perhaps the “rusted legacy” that
the title refers to is the legacy of the city, which is
now decayed and no longer what it used to be. It
is up to the daughter to clean up the ruins left of
her family history. The poet says she returns to her
mother’s house, where she needs gloves to handle
the medicinals (that kept the mother going even
though she was ill) and disease that pervade the
house. She wonders if she is up to the task. She is
an “accomplished criminal,” she says but does not
know if she can accomplish justice here. This
seems to imply that her criminal activity is not really criminal but politically subversive. Perhaps she
is an activist who has moved on to other things and
issues and now returns to the place of her past. It
could be her past “deeds” were ineffectual but not
“forgiven,” and now it is time to make positive
changes to the city. The poet says she does not
know whether she can do it, whether she can tear
“the old wedding sheets” (family heirlooms, intimate treasures of one’s past) and “clean” the place
as she needs to. There is a strong suggestion in this
stanza that the poet is a person of certain political
convictions who returns to the place of her youth,
a place that she both loves and despises. The city
she lived in has decayed, but the change she fought
for has never made an impact on the city. She has
come back to do something positive for the city,
but she is not sure that she can do it.
There is water imagery in this stanza as well.
The poet describes herself as stone with water
pleating across her. Again, the water here might be
tears. The idea of stone pleating across water also
implies change that is extremely gradual (water
eventually erodes and wears away stone). The poet
seems to lament the fact that she is so unmoved by
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In the final stanza, the poet at first refers to
herself in the first person but then makes references
in the third person, using “she” and “her.” In the
course of the poem, the poet has gone from being
a shadowy presence who speaks to the reader, who
then merges with the reader, who takes on a distinct personal past and becomes an “I,” and now
seems to look at herself in a distanced and disengaged manner. She asks if this “I” must lie scabbed
with rust. The title of the poem comes to mind, and
it now appears that the poet herself embodies the
“rusted legacy” referred to. Perhaps what she is
saying is that her political ideology and deeds that
once seemed so important are decayed and seem
ineffectual. Thus she is like the city; she had strong
beliefs that have degenerated, and in a sense, she
too has decayed. The poet is crammed with memories of this place, this city where, again, most
things are forgotten. There is no one left in this city,
she says, to “go around gathering the full dissident
story.” It sounds like she is the only one (of those
who were arrested, or in the park, perhaps?) of her
associates who has returned to the city and can tell
the truth about what has happened in the past. Perhaps all her youthful associates have left the city
(and the political causes) they held so dear when
they were young, and she is the only one who still
is fighting for justice. The poet says her hands and
shoulders are rusting, her lips stone (indicating she
is silenced in some way). Again there seems to be
some hope for change as there are tears “leaching
down” from her eyesockets (a disturbing image that
seems to imply the tears are coming from deep
within her). The water in her tears again might be
the force of change, the power that slowly reshapes
the stone of herself and the city into something of
hope and renewal. She asks if her tears are for “one
self” (herself) only. No, she concludes, her eyesockets, her tears are for the whole city. Each “encysts” it; each forms a sort of membrane or pouch
around the city. This is, again, a disturbing and
graphic image, but the idea seems to be that even
from horror, violence, bitterness, regret, and
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Research the work of other contemporary poets
who write about politics. How do their approaches and styles compare to or differ from
Rich’s?
• Explore the phenomenon of the “Baby Boomer”
generation, which was very involved in radical
politics in the 1960s but has now moved away
from political concerns and has embraced a
more consumer-oriented social attitude. In what
ways, if any, does this phenomenon connect to
Rich’s poem?
• Compare Rich’s “city” in “Rusted Legacy” to
other imaginary political cities that have been
described in the Western tradition, for example
the cities in Plato’s Republic and Thomas
More’s Utopia. Are there any similarities in the
descriptions of these political cities?
• The “city” Rich describes might be a figurative
and not a literal one. If it is figurative, what
might it represent?
mourning of a troubled past can there spring possibilities for positive change.
Themes
The Personal and the Political
“Rusted Legacy” is a work with political
themes, but those themes are suggested not by any
sustained action or statements in the poem but by
different images scattered throughout the four stanzas. The images presented for the most part are intimate, implying the close connection between personal attitudes and events and political ideas. The
poet invites the reader from the beginning to “Imagine a city,” and this city is not an abstract, ideal
city (like the philosopher Plato’s city in The Republic or the theologian St. Augustine’s city in The
City of God) but what seems to be a very real, recognizable place with deer being killed on highways,
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where there are sewers and parks, and where there
is architecture, governance, and people in power.
The intimate connection between the poet and the
city, the personal and the political, is emphasized
by the poet as she thinks of the city as a mother to
whom she returns when the former is dying.
Other images reinforce the link between the
personal and the political. The image of the “confused girl” seems to suggest the idea of political
statements made by women who shave their heads
to point out that the complexity of women’s political and social roles in society are most often not
fully appreciated. But it is significant that it is a
very particular girl (perhaps herself) that the poet
refers to; she is not merely a symbol but a very
real—but “forgotten”—girl who is part of the city.
The poet refers to herself specifically beginning in
the second stanza, explaining that she has a past in
the city. This point becomes even clearer in the
third stanza as she says she has forced herself to
come back to the city to put her mother’s house “in
order.” The poet uses another intimate image in the
third stanza when she wonders if she can tear the
old “wedding sheets” and use them as cleaning rags
to put her mother’s house in order.
The sense conveyed in much of the poem is that
the “rusted legacy” the poet is talking about is an
ideological legacy, ideas from the past that have
somehow become corrupted and are in a state of decay. At the end of the poem, the poet herself becomes these political ideas, as she is the one who is
“scabbed with rust.” That is, within her, the personal
and the political are completely fused. Like the other
themes and ideas in the poem, to try to spell out exactly what Rich “means” when she suggests that the
personal and political are intertwined is a difficult
task. Perhaps she is calling to her reader’s attention,
among other things, that politics pervade life at
every level, that personal actions determine what
happens in the world, and that emotional responses
can provide hope for positive change even in a repressive and troubled political environment.
The Corruption of Political Ideals
The image of the city in “Rusted Legacy” offers a physical image of a place where the ideas of
the past are in a state of decay. At first (in the first
stanza), the city seems to be the same city it always
was; it has the same architecture and governance
that it had in the past, the same men and women in
power. By the second stanza, it seems that the city
was always in some state of degeneration and corruption, for example, its sewers are the same as its
rivers. In the third stanza, there is the stark image
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of the city as an old woman who is sick and has
been kept alive through the use of “medicinals.”
The city in one way does not seem to have changed
from the past to the present day, but in another way,
it is a very different place now than it once was.
There seems to be a suggestion that political ideas,
positions, or outlooks in one sense stay the same
but in another they change a great deal over the
course of time. That is, the vibrancy of those ideas
becomes old and dull as time passes.
The poem seems to suggest that political ideals
of different kinds have corrupted over time. The
city, which perhaps embodies the status quo or
dominant ideology of American government (with
its mainstream values of liberal democracy and suspicion of “leftist” or radical politics), was once
powerful and strong but now it is like an old woman
who relies on medicines to keep her alive. The political ideals of the poet/speaker seem also to have
decayed over time. The poet says that she too is
scabbed with rust, so presumably her political
views have also degenerated. It could be that she
once tried to accomplish justice in the city by her
“dissent” but that was not successful. She returns
to the city years later to find that the city has decayed but so too have her own ideals, or at least
that they are no longer put into practice. Her lips
are stone, which indicates she no longer professes
(publicly) her ideals or does what needs to be done
to effect change. However, although the poet
laments the fact that political ideas and ideals are
in a state of decay, she holds out hope for change.
The tears that come from within her (a deeply personal and emotional response to the world) seem
to be a likely force with which to create change, to
“put her mother’s house in order,” to better the city,
and to make the world a better a place.
Style
Style
“Rusted Legacy” is a perplexing poem, one
that uses difficult language and concepts, unusual
images, and disjointed sequences of actions. It
seems to move from present to past and back again
but without any clear indication that this is what is
happening. It is told from the point of view of a
speaker/poet who addresses the reader, who provides intimate details about her own experiences,
and who sometimes implies that the experiences
she describes as her own are the reader’s. Such basic aspects of the poem as time and point of view
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are not clearly delineated, and much is required of
the reader to try to decipher who the poet might be,
what her history is, what events she is describing,
and in general what she might be trying to communicate. The overall effect of the disjointed style
is one of disorder and complexity. This effect underscores the political and personal confusion in
the poem, as it describes a city that forgets deeds
it has not forgiven, as it explores the poet’s own
emotions of confusion and guilt at being a “faithless daughter.”
The structure of the poem is not uniform,
which again suggests disorder. The first stanza is
eleven lines long, the second sixteen lines, the third
ten lines, and the fourth seven lines. The poem is
written in blank verse. The rhythm varies from
stanza to stanza and indeed from section to section
of the poem; there is no regular beat that ties it together. The only unifying element of the poem
comes at the end of the first three stanzas when the
poet asks the reader to “tell me” about the city and
in the fourth when she says her eyesockets “encysts” the city. The repetition and focus on the nature of the city at the end of each stanza provides
a loose structure to the poem, and the cryptic refrain further adds a sense of mystery and darkness
to the work.
Imagery
The mood of the poem is suggested by the various disturbing and startling images that are scattered throughout. Some of the images, like that of
the deer flattened on the highway, seem to have
definite implications (the deer might symbolize
wide-eyed innocence), but others seem to be highly
personal references. The “trays with little glasses
of water” the poet refers to in the second stanza,
for example, seems to be something from her personal past. Some of the images recur in the poem
in different forms. For example, there is a great deal
of water imagery, beginning with the sewers, river,
aquifers, and glasses of water in the second stanza
to the water pleating across stone in the third stanza,
to the poet’s tears in the fourth stanza. How these
images are tied together is not entirely clear, but
the water at the end of the poem does seem to suggest hope for renewal and change. By using water
imagery early on in the poem, the poet might be
referring to possibilities for change that were not
allowed to flourish or that were thwarted somehow.
Again, much of the imagery in the poem is cryptic, and it is left as a challenge to the reader to read
deeply and to explore possibilities of what individual references might be pointing to.
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Historical Context
Rich published “Rusted Legacy” in 1997, as the
century was drawing to a close. The poem is political, and although it is difficult to pinpoint particular events in the work, it clearly comments on
the political legacy of the second half of the twentieth century. This is a common theme in almost
all of Rich’s work from the 1960s on, as the poet
explores her frustrations with the status quo and the
injustice she perceives in society. Indeed, Rich expresses her anger at social injustice not only in her
work but also by being a vocal advocate for political change on a number of fronts, fighting for gay
rights, women’s rights, and economic justice. In
1997, the same year that “Rusted Legacy” was published, Rich made headlines when she refused the
National Medal for the Arts, which is awarded by
the White House. In a letter published by the New
York Times, Rich wrote “I cannot accept such an
award from President Clinton or this White House
because the very meaning of art, as I understand it,
is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” She further commented that she
could not be celebrated by a political system that
allowed such disparities between rich and poor in
American society.
“Rusted Legacy” is a poem written very much
in the spirit of Rich’s anger at the corrupt politics of
the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
The poem laments the degeneration of once powerful political principles as the poet looks back and is
saddened that the activism of earlier times did not
elicit any lasting change. Although Rich’s poem
makes no specific reference to this situation, it is interesting that President Bill Clinton has been seen
by many of his critics to have been a figure who
once held lofty political ideals (he was known for
his extremely liberal position in the 1960s and his
objection to the Vietnam War) but who abandoned
those notions for practical political gain—essentially
so that he could have a career in mainstream politics. While Rich does not make the connection in her
poem, it is ironic and significant that her public political objection to the Clinton administration in 1997
is echoed in her poem, written the same year, that
mourns the decay of political ideals.
Critical Overview
Since the publication of her first book of poems in
1951, Rich has been a dominating presence in
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American literary circles. She is one of the most
popular and influential poets of the early-twentyfirst century, publishing widely and prolifically and
traveling to give talks and read from her work. Each
new collection she publishes is thus a literary event,
and this was certainly the case with her volume
Midnight Salvage, in which “Rusted Legacy” appeared in 1999. Although the poem had been published two years earlier in the journal Sulfur, it was
not reviewed individually after its appearance
there. Even in the voluminous reviews of Midnight
Salvage, the poem has not received any individual
critical attention. Other poems in the collection,
such as “The Art of Translation” and “Midnight
Salvage,” have been singled out by critics as being
particularly noteworthy for their daring imagery
and nuanced language, but “Rusted Legacy” has
not been mentioned except in passing with other
poems as being one of Rich’s many reflections in
the volume on political repression. This might not
be an indication of lack of interest in the work so
much as a consequence of the difficulty of summarizing and characterizing the poem in analytic
terms. Interestingly, as a collection, Midnight Salvage has been praised by the vast number of writers who have reviewed it, but most examinations
of the work have been brief and not particularly informative. Ann K. Van Buren writing in the Library
Journal, for example, commented that the work is
“liberating in content and in form,” and Janet Montefiore in the Times Literary Supplement called the
poems “wide-ranging, untidy, and intimate.”
Again, the reason for the scarcity of commentary
may well be the difficult and cryptic nature of the
poems themselves, which do not lend themselves
to straightforward interpretation or easy analysis,
but which have a mysterious appeal because of the
intensity of language and imagery used.
Criticism
Uma Kukathas
Kukathas is a freelance editor and writer. In
this essay, Kukathas considers whether “Rusted
Legacy” fails as a political poem because of its use
of private rather than public language, images, and
ideas.
Like most of Rich’s poetry, “Rusted Legacy” is a
pointedly political work. Also, as is the case with a
great deal of Rich’s work, it is impossible to present in the form of a coherent analysis or statement
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exactly what the poem “means.” The language the
poet uses is difficult, her images are unusual and
sometimes perplexing, and the ideas explored in the
poem are hard to decipher. Indeed, paradoxically,
that this undoubtedly political poem is political is
not immediately obvious because the piece offers
no overt message or ideological position of any distinct sort. Rather, actions, images, and ideas are presented and explored that have political overtones.
The political nature of the poem, it might be said,
is apparent while the political view being discussed
in it (if there is one) is not clear at all. This is certainly unusual, as one would perhaps think that the
purpose of a political poem is to make plain to readers a particular viewpoint that the poet holds up as
more reasonable and reflective of the way the world
is (or should be) than competing theories. Or at least
one would expect it to explore the strengths and
weaknesses of competing political doctrines. Further, it would seem that a political poem would be
a public statement of some sort, written in a language that is far-reaching and accessible, that would
have some universal resonance to emphasize that
political and social concerns are common to all human beings. But “Rusted Legacy” meets none of
these expectations. It seems to take pains to be obscure, offers no clear political point of view and is
written in an intensely private style using images
and ideas that appear to be part of the poet’s very
individualized experiences that are certainly not
easily recognizable in all people at all times.
How, then, is the poem political? As noted earlier, Rich makes a number of allusions throughout
the piece to political ideas and images. It seems that
one of the things going on in the poem is that the
poet is reflecting on her past and the thinking about
the political environment in which she grew up. She
opens by asking readers to “[i]magine a city” with
a certain type of governance, where there are “men
and . . . women in power.” This seems to be the city
of the poet’s past but is also very much present in
her life right now. The poet seems to be remembering incidents from her past that have taken place
in the city, including her being present when people are being arrested and “villages gutted.” She
says she returns to the city to “accomplish justice”
and is the only one left to “gather . . . the full dissident story.” But these political allusions don’t
hang together very well to tell a coherent story.
They seem to suggest that the poet has had certain
experiences in the past that were politically significant to her, but why those experiences or events
should be important to anyone else is not clear at
all.
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‘Rusted Legacy’ is a
pointedly political work . . .
[that] seems to take pains
to be obscure, offers no
clear political point of
view, and is written in an
intensely private style. . . .”
The main reason it is not clear why those experiences should be important (politically or otherwise) to others is they are provided in a context
that is not public but private. Instead of situating
her political experience in a larger, more recognizable context, Rich focuses on specific, private
incidents that define those experiences for her. In
the first stanza, the poet talks about the city as
though she knows it intimately (she speaks with a
certain amount of familiarity and bitterness when
she explains that the city forgets but does not forgive, that it is intent on retributions) and offers a
series of three images. The first image, of a deer
being flattened on a highway, is bizarre but recognizable and thus “public” in some way. It seems
to suggest innocence and naiveté, perhaps of a political sort. The second image is of a “confused
girl” having her head shaved. This image could,
again, be political if one thinks of women with
shaved heads as representing the unappreciated
complexity of women’s social-political roles. But
that this is what this “confused girl” stands for is
not that obvious. It is also not clear whether the
girl might be the poet herself. The image does not
seem to be sufficiently public because what it is
supposed to represent is (at least for most readers)
so hard to unravel. The third image, of boys punishing frogs, is again universal and thus public, but
it is hard to say how the image fits in with the other
two and with the stanza as a whole. The images in
the second stanza are even more obscure. The poet
is, on the one hand, at a very particular place (“under the pines”) but there is no clue provided as to
where this might be. There are arrests going on,
but what are the arrests for? Who is the “they” being referred to? Why do they bring “little glasses
of water”? What were the poet and “they” trying
to “save”?
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
(2001) features essays by Rich written from the
1970s through the 1990s and shows how her
thinking about poetry and politics has changed
over time.
• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in
Twentieth-Century America (1999) by the
philosopher Richard Rorty discusses the shameful incidents of the United States’ political past
and urges that what is needed is a reform movement that can work positively to turn the country into a better nation.
• Rich’s collection Fox: Poems 1998–2000
(2001) contains more work that focuses on politics and shows her frustration with the injustice
in society.
• What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and
Politics (1994) contains journals, letters,
dreams, memories, and poems by Rich that reflect on how poetry and politics enter and influence American life.
These unexplained images and ideas work (or
don’t work) together to present a confusing picture.
The experiences described or alluded to are important to the poet, but in what way? They seem to
tell the reader nothing about her political beliefs or
point of view. Instead of making the political situation or governance or power structure she is talking about more recognizable to readers, they make
it less so. The events related seem not to be offered
to prompt in the reader certain shared ideas or feelings or to communicate commonly understood or
appreciated human experiences. They seem, in
essence, to be too completely private and personal
to be fitting for a public, political poem. The political allusions do not present an accessible, public message that strikes the reader as being “universal” in an important way.
All these features of “Rusted Legacy” would
suggest that it does indeed fail as a political poem.
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But does it? There is good case for saying that it
does not. It might be that the expectations and characteristics of a political poem offered earlier might
simply be too stringent and conservative, and it
could be that Rich is simply offering a political
poem of a different, maybe radical, sort. Rich could
be suggesting in both form and content of her work
that a political poem does not have to be “public”
or to have an overt message. In fact, she could be
suggesting that politics is much more complex than
can be expressed in statements of ideological or
doctrinal principles; it is an integral part of human
experience that loses its richness, complexity, and
power when reduced to slogans and statements of
beliefs. One of Rich’s intentions in the poem seems
to be to point out how the political and the personal
are connected. The most striking, and certainly the
most “universal,” “public,” and recognizable image
she uses is that of the city as the mother to which
she returns as a “faithless daughter” after some
years of absence. There is a sense that the political
past the poet is reflecting on is significant to her
not because of the ideologies involved but for a
much more personal reason. Deep feelings are generated (tears leach down from her eyesockets) when
the poet remembers the past, and it seems that an
emotional rather than a rational response is what is
required if the poet is to “accomplish justice,” effect political change, and “put her mother’s house
in order.”
“Rusted Legacy” is certainly a difficult and
confusing work. But its difficulty and obscurity are
not necessary failings but rather might be seen as
carefully chosen devices used to communicate a
deeper message about politics. Rich presents a series of disjointed images that are obviously rooted
in some personal experiences she has had. She remembers the political past not in terms of particular ideologies, slogans, positions, or statements of
beliefs. Rather it is a part of her emotional life. The
political, she seems to be saying, is not so much
about public views as it is about people’s personal
commitments and relationships, about how they see
the world not as public beings but as members of
a greater human family who love and disappoint
and hurt each other. Politics is bound up in everyday life, and to try to offer some statement about
how the world is or should be governed does not
do justice to how deeply politics is a part of human
experience.
“Rusted Legacy” does not fail as a political
poem because the political is not necessarily only
(or primarily) something public but something
deeply private. That Rich uses the image of a
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mother and daughter is especially significant because she seems to be saying that the political is
intensely private, intimate, and bound up with one’s
particular, often incommunicable experiences.
These experiences are even more recognizably
“universal” than more public ones because they
form the greater part of human existence and are
central to human emotional and mental life. The
other obscure images Rich uses in the poem might
not be familiar to readers, but they are part of the
poet’s political past in a way that is meaningful to
her. The poem explores a public subject in a most
private way—using private language, images, and
ideas—because politics is meaningful only insofar
as it is connected with real, intimate, human experiences that sometimes cannot be communicated or
understood but are for that reason no less “universal.”
Source: Uma Kukathas, Critical Essay on “Rusted Legacy,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill contends that Rich saves her
poem from the fate of many of her politically didactic works by using lush imagery and language
that is more poetic than preachy.
When Adrienne Rich is able to refrain from manbashing and obsessing on male violence against
women, when she can put aside overt political propagandizing and social injustice tirades, and when
she steps back from using her lesbianism as an inyour-face tool for provoking the status quo, her poetry is all the better for it. In spite of the fact that
Rich’s fame, or infamy, is founded on her tendency
to dwell on these very subjects, no scholar or general reader can deny that she has produced some of
the most arresting imagery and unique poetic visions of anyone writing in the contemporary United
States. One of her more recent poems, “Rusted
Legacy,” is evidence of it. This poem proves that
what one does simply with language can make a
remarkable difference in determining what is just
rhetorical fodder and what is truly a message worth
receiving.
The concern for place is a major component
of Rich’s poetry, and often it turns out that the place
in question is the speaker’s own body. While there
may be nothing inherently misleading about this
premise in verse, Rich frequently lingers on the intimate, personal self to the point of overkill. She
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Luckily for this
poem, its good parts are
lengthy enough to
withstand a brief bad
stanza. And those good
parts are made so by the
strong imagery they contain
and the intriguing
presentation of language.”
has long been noted for insisting that the personal
is inevitably political, and these two elements serve
as vital inspiration for her. As a result, they tend to
fuel each other throughout much of her work. In
Modern American Women Writers, critic Harriet
Davidson suggests that “Rich’s emphasis on ‘location’ keeps her tied to the material world and away
from the temptations of philosophical idealism and
transcendence that tend to obscure the material conditions of different people’s lives.” This may be
partially true, but the poet is no stranger to philosophizing in verse and using her publications as political platforms. Davidson addresses Rich’s common use of the physical being as a “location” in
saying that “The body’s world is in history, in
places, in discourses, a world we cannot escape or
control.” This theory is probably on the mark as far
as understanding Rich’s penchant for linking personal life to politics and, therefore, to history and
society in general. But in “Rusted Legacy” the
reader, for the most part, is spared too much intimate exposure and too much ideological ranting in
favor of provocative imagery and objective accounting. Certainly, place is central to the poem’s
context, but, here, the location is not the speaker’s
body, but a city. That alone helps make the poem
more palatable than many of Rich’s goading, didactic works.
Likely since the first poet put pen—or quill—
to paper, verse writers have endured the precarious
burden of assuring their art’s credibility, especially
in the face of so many who would cast it off as
mere fluff or sentimental poppycock. While history
has shown that the naysayers have at times been
justified in their skepticism, it has also shown that
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good poetry has served the populace well in explaining the unexplainable, reaching depths of the
mind and soul that may otherwise have remained
untouched, and in stirring the intellect to new levels of thought and deliberation. In essence, poetry
has been and still is a valuable component of human culture. But what must be maintained to assure its credibility is uniqueness and compelling
presentation. The metaphors and the specific details of “Rusted Legacy” make it worth reading.
They are related by an objective speaker—Rich
herself—describing what is outside her own mind
and body. The “city” she chronicles is harsh and
unforgiving, and it pays no mind to its victims—
the “deer flattened leaping a highway for food,” the
“confused girl’s head” that was shaved, apparently
in a mental institution, and “the frogs” bearing
whatever cruelty “small boys” can weigh upon
them. These are things most people are familiar
with, and yet they probably do not come to mind
until someone points them out. Rich’s message is
critical: it is easy to forget the suffering of the innocent when they are overshadowed by the mindless machine of “governance” and “the men and the
women in power.”
The poem becomes even stronger metaphorically in the second stanza. Regardless of what city
or cities are referred to, one knows for sure that
these are towns with troubled histories, towns that
the poet lived in or visited long enough to witness
social unrest among the citizens and a frequently
severe response from the government. Rich is eloquent in her depiction of an evidently dismal
scene—the city is “divorced from its hills,” and
“temples and telescopes” have played a role in
breaking down the codes of would-be revolutionaries and dissidents. Perhaps the city in the second
stanza is Rome, which Rich visited as a young
woman. But this idea is downplayed as though to
emphasize that the specific place is not as important as understanding the condition of urban life
generally and symbolically. The word “brailling”
adds a wonderful touch to keep the idea of codes
and underground operations and government
probes alive. Since it is spelled with two l’s, one
must assume the word is simply the verb form of
Braille, a type of code used by the blind. But the
phrase “a city brailling through fog” reminds one
of the word “brail” (spelled with one l), a nautical
term for the nets that one uses to haul in fish. This
definition still cleverly perpetuates notions of dissident behavior and how those involved often become trapped in the nets of government crackdowns and investigations. Rich enhances the image
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with “thicket and twisted wire,” again implying a
world of secret networks and a web of revolutionary activity.
All of that metaphorical bounty is contained in
only the first four lines of the second stanza of
“Rusted Legacy.” There is much more. As a selfprofessed follower of Karl Marx (the nineteenthcentury German economist and political philosopher), Rich often explores the Marxist theory of
dialectics—the endeavor to reach a solution to a
problem by pitting opposing forces against each
other in a series of questions, arguments, and answers. For Marx, and perhaps for Rich, the ultimate
use of dialectics is in the concept of class struggle,
in which the fight would lead to less distinction
among citizens in society and to a communist economy. But in “Rusted Legacy,” “night’s velvet dialectic” is a strikingly poetic way of describing how
sewers can be rivers and rivers “art’s unchartered
aquifers” whose springhead opens into yet another
possible metaphor, a fountain in a public garden.
Water is an important symbol in this poem, both
for its role as a source or a beginning and as a substance that can cause other materials to break down,
an idea implied later in the poem. Here, Rich uses
it as a transport, so to speak, to move the poem
from a present city she asks the reader to imagine
back to a city she recalls being in “while the arrests were going on.” The sewer waters of underground activity give way, metaphorically, to the
garden fountains, which, in turn, lead Rich’s memory to the “trays with little glasses of cold water”
offered to the revolutionaries before they were detained by police or military personnel. As usual,
Rich’s point is political: governments are oppressive, and even helpless little villages are not safe
from the big, trampling boots of capitalists. The
poem is saved from overt political philosophizing
simply by its admirable poetics. Rich makes nice
use of the water metaphor, allowing it to guide both
herself and the reader on a journey from the present to a historically significant moment (at least,
in the poet’s mind) and back to the present: “tell
me if this is not the same city.”
True to her contention that the personal is political and that poetry is a vehicle for exploring the
two together, Rich moves “Rusted Legacy” into the
intimate arena of her own life before closing. While
the third stanza concentrates on mother-daughter
allusions, incorporating both the personal (“I have
forced myself to come back like a daughter / required to put her mother’s house in order”) and the
political (“Accomplished criminal I’ve been but /
can I accomplish justice here?”), it also continues
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the water metaphor. Likely, it also explains the title of the poem. It is no secret that Rich’s relationship with her parents was strained, at best, and,
therefore, it is no surprise that she describes herself as “Faithless daughter / like stone.” But water,
in the form of tears this time, is also present, and
the idea that enough water can erode stone, taking
advantage of its porous nature and exposing its vulnerability. Apparently, even a hard-hearted daughter has her weaknesses. Water does something else
too. It aids the growth of rust, and even the toughest, hardest of metals is susceptible to it. By
portraying herself as “scabbed with rust,” the poet
exposes her own vulnerability through metaphor—
perhaps softening the recognition of a dubious
legacy.
It is unfortunate that some poets go beyond
points where they should have ended. That is, they
take a poem past its effective stopping point to belabor what does not need to be belabored. Rich does
this with “Rusted Legacy,” a poem that is otherwise provocative and intellectually stimulating. In
the last stanza, after describing herself as “scabbed
with rust,” she falters into self-pity and sentimentality. There is a weak attempt to make another political statement in descrying the fact that there is
“no one left / to go around gathering the full dissident story” (presumably, her own), but it carries little weight on which to end the poem. Probably the
last two lines of “Rusted Legacy” actually reveal
what is wrong with most of the last stanza: the tears
are “for one self only.” Although the final statement, “each encysts a city,” may try to reconnect
the personal to the political or social, it rings too
much of pathos and is too overworked to be persuasive. Even the seldom used verb “encysts” is an
obvious attempt at drama, but one without payoff.
Luckily for this poem, its good parts are
lengthy enough to withstand a brief bad stanza. And
those good parts are made so by the strong imagery
they contain and the intriguing presentation of language. One who is familiar enough with Rich’s
work understands why it has been both loved and
hated by critics and the reading public. When her
poetry exists solely as a platform to convey a fervent political or social statement, the language is
generally hateful and flat, as well as inflammatory.
For this reason, some people consider Rich more
an activist or feminist than a poet. But when her
work conveys her messages—albeit controversial
and militant—with attractive metaphors and powerful visual details, it demonstrates that she is indeed a poet in the best sense of the word. Asked
by critic Rachel Spence about the current direction
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of her poetry, in an interview included in Rich’s
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations,
Rich said, “I have thought recently that my poetry
exposes the scarring of the human psyche under the
conditions of a runaway, racist capitalism. But
that’s because my psyche is also scarred by these
conditions.” This analysis of her own poetry may
get at the root of why she has turned out numerous
questionable works in the field of poetry. But
“Rusted Legacy” is one of Rich’s good poems, and
it need not be diminished by any that came before
or after it.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Rusted
Legacy,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Davidson, Harriet, “Adrienne Rich,” in Modern American
Women Writers, edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz,
Scribner, 1991, pp. 441–56.
Montefiore, Janet, Review of Midnight Salvage, in Times
Literary Supplement, No. 5094, November 17, 2000.
Review of Midnight Salvage, in Kirkus Reviews, January 15,
1999.
Rich, Adrienne, “Interview with Rachel Spence,” in Arts of
the Possible: Essays and Conversations, W. W. Norton,
2001, pp. 138–45.
Van Buren, Ann, Review of Midnight Salvage, in Library
Journal, May 1, 1999.
Further Reading
Cooper, Jane Roberta, Reading Adrienne Rich: Review and
Re-Visions, 1951–81, The University of Michigan Press,
1984.
This book presents a collection of interpretive and
critical essays and reviews on Rich’s poetry and
prose.
Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Albert Gelpi, eds., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, W. W. Norton and Company, 1975.
This book contains a selection of Rich’s early poetry
and prose along with critical commentaries.
Keyes, Claire, The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, The University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Keyes offers a critical examination of Rich’s work
from 1951 to the mid-1980s that builds on the feminist criticism of the 1960s.
Yorke, Liz, Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics and the Body,
Sage Publications, 1997.
Yorke introduces readers to Rich’s work by focusing
on the poet’s political prose and demonstrating the
complexity of Rich’s contribution to feminism.
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Smart and Final Iris
James Tate
1986
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“Smart and Final Iris” appears in James Tate’s collection Reckoner, published in 1986, and is
reprinted in his Selected Poems (1991). Though
known primarily for his playful, often hallucinatory lyrics in which his speakers stumble about in
a world of bizarre characters and events, Tate addresses socio-political subjects in his poems as
well, highlighting the ways in which reality is often more absurd and dreamlike than dreams. “Land
of Little Sticks, 1945,” for example, the opening
poem from Constant Defender (1983), mythically
depicts the moment when the first atomic bombs
were dropped, and suggests that the world will
never be the same. Like “Land of Little Sticks,
1945,” “Smart and Final Iris” addresses the possibility of nuclear annihilation and the ways in which
that possibility affects the human imagination. In
twenty short lines, Tate poetically describes the absurdity of the Pentagon’s attempt to account for
various scenarios resulting from nuclear war. He
does this by turning the military’s own practice of
using silly code names for violent operations and
outcomes against itself, in the process showing the
insufficiency of language to adequately represent a
catastrophe like nuclear war. Tate draws on readers’ knowledge of popular culture to write this serious but funny poem.
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Author Biography
James Vincent Tate was born in Kansas City,
Missouri, in 1943, in the middle of World War II.
Tate’s father, Samuel Vincent Appleby, was a pilot who was reported missing in action while on a
bombing run over Germany in his B-17. Tate, who
never met his father, was raised by his mother,
Betty Jean Whitsitt. The title piece of his prizewinning Yale Younger Poets collection of poems,
The Lost Pilot (1967), captures the poet’s sense of
the loss of his dead father. Themes of loss, absence,
and imminent catastrophe pervade much of Tate’s
work. Tate is also fascinated with war, which he
explores in “Smart and Final Iris,” “Land of Little
Sticks, 1945,” and other poems.
Tate began writing poetry at 17, often composing in a trance-like state. Though he read and admired modernist poets William Carlos Williams and
Wallace Stevens, Tate maintains that neither influenced him, and that it is difficult to name any direct
influences on his writing—although he will admit to
being a jazz aficionado, and a life-long student of
popular culture and human nature. In 1965, he graduated from Kansas State College, and in 1967 he
took a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop, where
he studied with poet Donald Justice, among others.
In 1971, after teaching at Columbia University and
the University of California, Berkeley, Tate joined
the English department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he remains today.
From the moment Tate appeared on the scene,
critics have characterized his poetry as improvisational, surreal, bizarre, absurd, and singular.
Though some have faulted his poetry for being little more than verbal antics, most have recognized
Tate’s original voice and see his poetry as part of
a process of spiritual questing and self-invention.
Tate seems to agree with them, to a point. In
his introduction to Best American Poetry of 1997,
Tate writes, “What we want from poetry is to be
moved, to be moved from where we now stand. We
don’t just want to have our ideas or emotions confirmed.”
The larger poetry world seems to agree with
him. Tate’s peers have awarded him many of the
literary world’s top honors, including a National
Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry in
1974; Guggenheim and National Endowment for
the Arts fellowships in 1976 and 1980, respectively; the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992, for Selected Poems; and the National Book Award for
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James Tate
poetry in 1994, for Worshipful Company of Fletchers. Tate was also awarded the $100,000 Tanning
Prize from the Academy of American Poets in
1995. He has authored some thirty books and chapbooks of poetry, from presses small and large.
Poem Text
Pentagon code
For end of world
Is rural paradise,
If plan fails
It’s rural paradise
5
For losses under
100 million, a trip
on the wayward bus
For a future of mutants,
bridal parties collide
10
World famine is
a plague of beatniks
First strike and
I sniff your nieces
I fall to pieces
Get hell out . . .
A madman comes,
one of those babies
the further you kick it
the bigger it gets.
15
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nuclear war fail. The phrase is ironic because there
would be no paradise in the aftermath of a war. The
word “rural” alludes to the fact that cities would be
the primary targets and bombed first. By repeating
the phrase “rural paradise,” clarifying it the second
time, Tate delays the ironic effect, showing his adroitness with comic timing.
Lines 6–8
• In 1992, New Letters on the Air released an untitled audiocassette of Tate reading his poems.
• The Academy of American Poets has a website
on Tate at http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.
cfm?prmID=71 with biographical information
and links to a few poems.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–5
Tate’s title, “Smart and Final Iris,” refers to the
name of a warehouse grocery chain that operates
over 214 stores in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Florida, and Mexico. The
name is derived from the company’s founders, Jim
Smart and Hildane Final. Iris is the name of the company’s private brand label introduced in 1895. In
1953, after acquiring its leading competitor, Haas,
Baruch, and Co., Smart and Final became Smart &
Final Iris Co. The obscurity of the title makes it a
code of sorts because readers have to figure out what
it has to do with the poem. This tactic makes sense
because the poem concerns itself with the idea of
code names and what they represent.
The Pentagon is the building in Arlington
County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., that
houses the United States Department of Defense
and all four branches of the military—Army, Navy,
Air Force, and Marines. It is also one of the world’s
largest office buildings. But “Pentagon” is often
used to refer to the U.S. military in general.
The first line refers to the Pentagon’s practice of
giving code names to military operations and scenarios. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, the
United States Airborne Alert Program, which kept up
to a dozen nuclear-armed bombers airborne 24 hours
a day to deter a possible Soviet surprise attack, was
variously called “Head Start,” “Round Robin,” and
“Chrome Dome.” Tate satirizes this practice by imagining what the Pentagon’s code words would be for
the end of the world, if Pentagon military plans for
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In this stanza, Tate again satirizes the Pentagon’s naming of horrific scenarios of mass destruction. Military bureaucracies are often criticized for using cost-benefit analysis to develop war
strategies and to calculate acceptable numbers for
the loss of human life. The phrase, “a trip on the
wayward bus,” conjures up associations of carefree, serendipitous travel, and the image of Volkswagen buses of the 1960s.
Lines 9–12
In these stanzas, Tate first presents the image
of a “future of mutants” resulting from a nuclear
war. His code for such a scenario, “bridal parties
collide,” is even more bizarre than his previous
codes, and suggests the drama, comedy, and confusion at weddings, and the promise of children often resulting from them. Many of the children born
to survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were deformed because of the radiation their
mothers experienced from the atomic blasts. The
phrase also calls up images of monsters and the
walking dead, popularized in films such as Dawn
of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead. The link
between the code and what it signifies is comical
in the next stanza because Tate plays with the idea
of beatniks as impoverished artists who are frequently hungry. The word beatnik is often used as
a derisive term for members of the Beat generation
of the 1950s, a social and literary movement whose
members abhorred conventional society and sought
spiritual enlightenment through jazz, drugs, sex,
and the practice of Eastern religion including Zen
Buddhism. Beats were also the precursors to the
hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, who shared many
of the same beliefs. To have a “plague” of them is
doubly derisive.
Lines 13–16
In this stanza, the absurdity of assigning code
names for scenarios of nuclear holocaust and of
Tate’s own poem comes to a head. “First strike”
refers to the military strategy of initiating nuclear
war. First strike was a viable option in the Pentagon during the cold war. The idea behind such a
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Tate has written other poems on the horrors of
nuclear war. Compare his poem “Land of Little
Sticks, 1945” from his collection Constant Defender with “Smart and Final Iris.” What are the
differences and similarities in how they describe
scenarios for nuclear annihilation?
• Conduct a survey of people over forty years old
and under forty, asking them to what degree they
believe a nuclear war is possible in their lifetime. Then, write an essay exploring what the
answers have in common and how they differ.
What conclusions can you draw from the responses?
• Research and report on the current strategy of
the United States for nuclear defense. Do you
agree with it? Why or why not?
• Assume you and a few classmates have been
given the responsibility of drawing up a response and survival plan for your school in the
event of a limited nuclear attack on a city fifty
miles away. What would your priorities be?
What does this tell you about your own values?
• Poll your class to see who believes that nuclear
arms are a deterrent to war and who believes
they are not. Then, research the positions and
stage a debate.
strategy is that by striking (bombing) the enemy
first, you take away their ability to respond. By saving this military operation as the last to be named,
Tate underscores its inherent absurdity, and the absurdity, in general, of planning for a nuclear war.
The code here mimics song lyrics and underscores
the continued deterioration of the logic that links
the code to what it represents.
Lines 17–20
This is the only stanza in which there is no
code. Yet the stanza itself needs interpreting and
so can be seen as a code, as can much poetry. The
madman here might be any tyrant with access to
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• Compile a list of code names for military operations and projects for the twentieth century (for
example, the 1991 war against Iraq was dubbed
“Operation Desert Storm”), then write a poem
using these names.
• Research the number of countries that either
now possess or have the capability of making
a nuclear bomb. Next, research which of these
countries is currently involved in a conflict
with another country or countries. Which country do you think might use the bomb first, and
why?
• All of the following code words are related to
projects associated with nuclear bombs and nuclear bomb testing by the U.S. government:
“Operation Ranger”; “Fat Man”; “Operation
Plumbob”; “Ranier.” Research what they refer
to and report your findings to your class.
• Compare and contrast films about nuclear war
released before and after 1980 and report on how
the depiction of nuclear war has changed over
time. Start with these films: On the Beach
(1959); Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963); FailSafe (1964); Mad Max II (1981); Threads
(1984); and The Day After (1984).
nuclear weapons, or maybe even someone at the
Pentagon caught up in the image of himself as a
hero or patriot. Popular culture is full of just such
figures. By using the pronoun “it” to refer to “one
of those babies,” Tate shows his contempt for such
people. He dehumanizes those who treat others as
numbers in a war game and can even imagine a
world after nuclear war. These madmen “get bigger” because they get madder when “kicked” by
their enemies. Tate uses these terms figuratively.
“Getting bigger” suggests becoming more outlandish in one’s behavior, more self-righteous. The
poem ends on this ominous note, creating a sense
of imminent doom.
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Themes
Language and Meaning
Modern poetry has long been considered a rarified form of expression, accessible only to those
trained in the “art” of interpretation. In this sense, it
can be seen as a code needing deciphering. “Smart
and Final Iris” alludes to poetry’s reputation as a difficult art by making a poem out of the very subjects
of obscurity and codes. The title of the poem highlights this fact. Just as the U.S. military uses words
bearing little discernible logic to the events they signify, so too does Tate use a title with no seeming
logical relationship to the poem it names. In copying the military’s naming tactics, however, Tate
makes poetry out of them. Although “Smart and Final Iris” alludes to a chain of grocery warehouses—
something most readers would not know—it is also
a somewhat fitting image for nuclear apocalypse.
The image of the nuclear mushroom cloud is flowerlike, and the words “smart” and “final” can be read
as both ironic (what’s smart about dropping
bombs?), and descriptive of a nuclear holocaust. By
appropriating the Pentagon’s naming practices, Tate
is able to show the irony inherent in attempting to
imagine the end of human civilization while at the
same time working to prevent such an event.
Popular Culture
By referring to and incorporating elements of
popular culture into his poem, Tate reconfigures
readers’ expectations about poetry’s subject matter. Historically, critics have judged “great” poetry
to be that which transcends historical circumstances
and says something universal about the human condition. “Smart and Final Iris,” however, is rooted
in history and American culture. Readers need to
know what the Pentagon is, the American military’s
practice of giving code names to operations, the
double meaning of the title, and something about
the fear of nuclear war to fully appreciate the poem.
Arguably, such topical subject matter also makes
the poem more immediately relevant to readers’
lives than, say, another love poem.
Cold War
Historians often date the Cold War from the
end of World War II until 1989, with the opening
of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The term refers to the struggle for power
between Western powers and Communist countries
during this time. The nuclear arms race between
the Soviet Union and the United States is a direct
result of the Cold War, and the scenarios Tate satir-
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ically describes would not be imaginable without
the race. In the second half of the twentieth century, many of the images and much of the discourse
on nuclear war in popular culture assumed it would
result from a clash between the superpowers.
Style
Definitions
“Smart and Final Iris” is written as a series of
definitions. Definitions are statements that attempt
to express the meaning of a word, word group, sign,
or symbol. Tate inverts the conventional order of
defining terms by first supplying the definition and
then the name of the thing defined. For example, he
first gives the definition of “rural paradise” in the
opening stanza, writing, “Pentagon code / for end of
world.” This is similar to how questions and answers
are formulated on the popular game show, Jeopardy.
By using code words to name the thing defined, Tate
is creating metaphors. Metaphors are figures of
speech that draw similarities between two unlike
things or ideas. Tate’s metaphoric definitions are often ironic because the similarities are the opposite
of what one would expect. For example, “paradise”
isn’t what most people think of when they think of
the end of the world. The effect of providing ironic
definitions is that readers see things in a new light.
Satire
“Smart and Final Iris” satirizes the U.S. military’s attitude toward nuclear warfare by poking
fun at the way the Pentagon gives secret code
names to various scenarios for nuclear war. Satire
often uses irony, wit, and sarcasm to reveal humanity’s vices or stupidity and to make change possible. The purpose of satire is primarily moral, that
is, it aims to provoke a response. A favored classical genre, satire remains popular in literature,
film, and other art forms today, often targeting political figures and institutions.
Historical Context
Tate wrote this poem in the early 1980s, when
Ronald Reagan was president of the United States.
A conservative Republican and staunch advocate
of a strong defense, Reagan was a militant Cold
War politician who once called the Soviet Union
an “evil empire.” In 1981, a year after Reagan’s
election, Congress approved an $18 billion increase
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Compare
&
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• 1983: President Ronald Reagan announces
plans for an extensive program to examine the
feasibility of a missile defense program. The
concept—derided as “Star Wars” by opponents
in Congress—revises the nation’s 35-year-old
nuclear strategy by focusing on missile defense
rather than the ability to retaliate against nuclear
attack.
2001: Although Russia, China, and North Korea tell the U.N. Disarmament Commission that
a U.S. missile defense system would threaten international security, trigger a new arms race, and
undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,
President Bush advocates further developing the
system. The proposed 2002 defense budget allots $8.3 billion for missile defense.
• 1986: Washington severs all economic and commercial relations with Libya, accusing it of giving aid to international terrorists.
Libya sanctions to allow shipments of donated
clothing, food, and medicine for humanitarian
reasons. All other U.S. sanctions against Libya
remain in force.
• 1986: The Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl in
the Ukraine is destroyed by fire, sending a large
radiation cloud over much of Europe and contaminating vast areas of Ukraine, Russia, and
Belarus.
2001: Ukrainian officials say that 400,000
adults and 1.1 million children are currently entitled to state aid, as a result of the Chernobyl
accident.
• 1986: President Reagan signs the tax reform bill
into law, the first full scale remodification since
1954.
2001: Following the Libyan handover of two
suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight
103 to stand trial before a Scottish Court in the
Netherlands, the United States modifies its
2001: President Bush signs into law the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation
Act of 2001. The 10-year, $1.35 trillion package provides for the biggest tax cut since 1981
and the most sweeping changes to the tax system since the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
in defense spending. Part of this increase included
the creation of a rapid deployment force, and the
construction of the neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon
that maximizes damage to people but minimizes
damage to buildings and equipment. Reagan’s
hard-line stance against arms control as a means of
dealing with the Soviet military threat included
public statements about the Unites States’ chances
of winning a “limited” nuclear war by confining
losses to Europe. However, the nuclear freeze
movement, a group dedicated to halting the production and proliferation of nuclear weapons, made
it more difficult for Reagan to maintain his hardline stance. Although Congress passed Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed “Star Wars”),
based on the use of space satellites equipped with
lasers to shoot down Soviet missiles in the air, it
appropriated only a fraction of the Reagan admin-
istration’s requested budget for SDI. In 1986, Congress prohibited further SDI tests and cut the SDI
budget by one-third. Although the military budget
under the Reagan administration increased from
$157 billion in 1981 to $233 billion in 1986, Americans were no more secure than before.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was undergoing
tremendous changes, as the new Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, was pushing for reforms to liberalize the country. Reagan and Gorbachev met in
Geneva in 1985 in a superpower summit, and Reagan agreed, in principle, to Gorbachev’s proposal
for both countries to cut nuclear weapons by fifty
percent. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet
Union signed the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty
(INF), in which both countries agreed to dismantle
more than 2,500 Soviet and American short range
missiles based in Europe.
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A mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion
The subject of nuclear war pervaded the music
of the 1980s as well, whether it was heavy metal,
reggae, rock, or folk. Pink Floyd sang about the finality of nuclear war in “Two Suns in the Sunset,”
while Underworld’s “Underneath the Radar” used
early warning systems for nuclear war as a metaphor
for love. Many songs protested the Reagan administration’s pronuclear stance in their lyrics, such as
Escape Club’s tune, “Wild, Wild West”: “Gotta live
it up, live it up / Ronnie’s got a new gun / Headin’
for the nineties, livin’ in the eighties, / screamin’ in
the backroom, / waitin’ for the big boom.” Reagan
didn’t help matters when, before one of his weekly
Saturday radio addresses in 1984, he jokingly said
into the microphone (which he thought was turned
off), “We are going to bomb Russia in fifteen minutes.” His gaffe was later incorporated into a number of rap and pop songs of the era.
nal Iris” is about the public’s “helplessness in the
face of the doublespeak of ‘Pentagon code.’” Lee
Upton similarly notes that many poems in the collection appeal to readers who have lost faith in conventional institutions of the state. Dick Allen’s review is typical of the position taken by Tate’s
detractors. Known for his love of formalist poetry
and his own formalist poems, Allen calls the poems
in Reckoner, “basically a self-indulgent exercise for
which there is no excuse.” Allen faults Tate’s poems for their lack of social significance and, mimicking Tate’s penchant for using surrealist imagery,
writes, “This is occasional surrealistic poetry, written with the fingernails on stumps of fog.”
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Critical Overview
Tate has always had both fans and detractors, and
critical responses to Reckoner (1986), the volume
in which “Smart and Final Iris” appears, illustrate
this. Chris Stroffolino, for example, notes that the
volume marks Tate’s turn “toward society and sociopolitical themes,” and says that “Smart and Fi-
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Semansky is an instructor of English literature
and composition whose essays, poems, and stories
regularly appear in journals and magazines. In this
essay, Semansky considers how Tate’s poem on the
topic of weapons is also a kind of weapon itself.
James Tate’s poem “Smart and Final Iris” is both
about the terrors of nuclear weaponry and is a kind
of weapon itself. As a poem, it examines the rela-
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tionship between war and language, showing the
part words play in the construction of popular images about nuclear war. In doing this, the poem intervenes in the ways readers think and, hopefully,
respond to the threat of war.
By taking as his subject the Pentagon’s practice of giving secret code names to its nuclear defense strategy, Tate foregrounds the role of language in how human beings imagine death. Like
death, codes are a secret, standing in a metaphoric
relationship to the thing or things they represent.
Their purpose is to obscure or hide what they name.
Consider the poem’s title, which is taken from
the name of a chain of grocery stores. To most readers, who do not understand the reference, the title
would remain a mystery. Even if a reader did catch
the reference in the title, its meaning might still remain a mystery. After all, what does a grocery
warehouse chain have in common with a poem
about nuclear war? Many readers would simply
chalk up the reference to poetry’s reputation as a
difficult and esoteric art form. They might even
think that they’re not “smart” enough to “get it.”
But “getting it” is precisely the idea the poem
addresses. By foregrounding the ways in which poems are codes, Tate implicitly asks readers to consider how the Pentagon keeps secret information
about their own future from them, citing reasons of
“national security.” Like the Pentagon, many modern and contemporary poems are deliberately obscure, and poets often rationalize poetry’s difficulty
by claiming that it takes a special kind of person
or mind to understand them, someone who is aesthetically sensitive to language, or who knows how
to read “correctly.” For many, poetry remains a
kind of “secret language,” accessible only to the
initiated. By parodying the ways in which the Pentagon uses code names for unimaginable events,
Tate calls into question the moral authority of those
who create the codes and keep the secrets, and he
points out the irrationality of the practice.
Tate also touches on the questionable practice
of preparing for nuclear war in order to avoid it.
Critic John Gery notes the absurdity as well, writing:
What distinguishes our contemporary sense of annihilation, whether it come about by nuclear, ecological, biomedical, or other technological forces, is that
we imagine it will occur not in spite of our human
efforts but because of them.
This idea is embedded in Tate’s poem, as all
of the scenarios suggest failure of the “plan.”
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Indeed, a large part
of society’s ‘nuclear
anxiety’ stems from the
belief that nuclear war
could occur despite best
intentions and current
controls.”
Tate treats catastrophic results of a nuclear
holocaust such as a mutating race, widespread
death, and famine as opportunities to lampoon the
military and underscore humanity’s current
predicament. His darkly humorous codes for these
scenarios attest to his vision of a world gone mad,
where the only rational response to imminent doom
is laughter. Black humor has a long history in
American literature. Novelists such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon, among
others, have used it to emphasize the absurdity and
paradox of modern life and, especially, of modern
warfare. Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove;
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1963) is perhaps the best-known black humor response to the threat of nuclear war and draws
on the Cold War fears of the 1950s and 1960s. The
film’s cast of characters includes a mad scientist,
an inept president, and a pair of macho, psychotic
generals intent on world destruction. Tate alludes
to just such characters in the last stanza:
A madman comes,
one of those babies
the further you kick it
the bigger it gets.
Tate’s associative logic and surrealist imagery
formally parallel ideas associated with the fear of
nuclear war: randomness and accident. However
unlikely or impossible, the chance that a nuclear
war could be started by someone pushing the wrong
button or by misunderstanding orders is an idea often presented in films and writing on the subject.
Indeed, a large part of society’s “nuclear anxiety”
stems from the belief that nuclear war could occur
despite best intentions and current controls. Such
potential miscommunication highlights the importance of clear channels of command and precise
language in keeping the world safe. By suggesting
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Tate’s Selected Poems (1991) draws from all of
his major collections to this date and provides
an overview of his development as a poet. Tate
won a Pulitzer Prize for this volume.
• One of Tate’s friends and a strong influence on
his poetry, Bill Knott, published Laugh at the
End of the World: Collected Comic Poems,
1969–1999 in 2000. Knott’s goofy vision of the
world and his absurdist sense of humor are strikingly similar to Tate’s.
• Richard Howard’s 1988 translation of Andre
Breton’s classic surrealist novel Nadja, first
published in the 1920s, details the narrator’s
wanderings through the streets of Paris with a
seemingly “mad” woman named Nadja. Breton
uses his narrative to reflect on the nature of time,
perception, space, and reality. Tate writes out of
the surrealist tradition.
• In 1977, Tate published a novel entitled Lucky
Darryl: A Novel, which he wrote with Bill
Knott. The two have collaborated on poems as
well.
• John Gery’s 1996 study entitled Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of
Nothingness examines both the direct and the in-
that the Pentagon’s “plan” to keep the world safe
contributes to the possibility of miscommunication
and heightens the chance of nuclear outbreak, Tate
underscores the perilous nature of language. He
elaborates on this belief in his essay “Live Yak
Pie,” written as an introduction to Best American
Poetry 1997. The idea is a central part of his own
poetics:
The poet arrives at his or her discovery by setting
language on edge of creating metaphors that suggest
dangerous ideas, or any number of other methods.
The point is, language can be hazardous as it is our
primary grip on the world. When language is skewed,
the world is viewed differently. But this is only effective if the reader can recognize this view, even
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direct impact of the nuclear threat on American
poets from Gertrude Stein to James Merrill, providing both detailed readings of over fifty poems and four general groups into which poems
might be categorized: protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psychohistorical poetry, and the
poetry of uncertainty.
• Paul Brian’s book entitled Nuclear Holocausts:
Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984 (1986) provides a highly readable and detailed annotated
bibliography of fiction depicting nuclear war or
its aftermath.
• In 1995, Coffee House Press released an anthology of poetry addressing the possibility of
nuclear apocalypse, entitled Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age. The collection,
edited by John Bradley, contains poems from
more than one hundred poets, including Adrienne Rich and William Dickey.
• James Merrill was a widely respected poet
whose work often explored human responses to
living in the nuclear age. Critic Timothy
Materer’s 2000 study of Merrill’s poetry, James
Merrill’s Apocalypse, shows how apocalyptic
motifs inspire and inform Merrill’s poetry.
though it is the first time he or she has experienced
the thought.
Recognizing how Tate skews the language is
the reader’s challenge. The “dangerous idea” in
“Smart and Final Iris” is that our image of the world
is being configured by forces beyond our control
and without our approval. It isn’t only the idea that
a nuclear apocalypse is a strong possibility, but that
individuals can do nothing to prevent it. The crumbling relationship between code and referent in
Tate’s poem attests to the fact that the system itself is breaking down.
First strike and
I sniff your nieces
I fall to pieces
Get hell out . . .
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It is no coincidence that Tate mocks the Pentagon’s strategy of first strike capability in his
penultimate stanza. Critics of the first strike strategy routinely point out its status as the very catalyst for the nuclear arms race. In short, first-strike
capability denotes a country’s ability to eliminate
retaliatory second-strike forces of another country.
At the height of the Cold War in 1962, then U.S.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains
the “logic” behind staying ahead in the nuclear
arms race in his speech, “Mutual Deterrence”:
Now what about the Soviet Union? Does it today possess a powerful nuclear arsenal? The answer is that
it does. Does it possess a first-strike capability against
the United States? The answer is that it does not. Can
the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future acquire
such a first-strike capability against the United
States? The answer is that it cannot. It cannot because
we are determined to remain fully alert and we will
never permit our own assured-destruction capability
to drop to a point at which a Soviet first-strike capability is even remotely feasible.
By 1986, when Tate’s poem appeared, McNamara’s words still expressed the Pentagon’s policy.
Despite the Soviet Union’s dissolution, President
Bush’s decision to pursue Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative is only the latest manifestation that
the arms race is alive and well in the twenty-first
century.
Tate’s poem, though, is a strike against the
Pentagon’s attempt to dictate the world’s future
with policies built to fail. Gery emphasizes poetry’s
power in the atomic age, writing, “without having
to lay claim to universality or transcendence, poetry can still, to paraphrase Theodore Roethke,
learn by going where it has to go—not only as an
agent for change but as an agent of change.” Psychologists Robert Jay Lifton and Nicholas
Humphrey, experts on the psychology of surviving
war and living in the atomic age, second Gery’s
view, suggesting that poets are among the frontline soldiers in humanity’s fight for survival:
If anything in our culture symbolizes the fact and hope
of human continuity, it is the continuing presence of
the poets, philosophers, and thinkers of the last few
thousand years, who in the service of life once
stretched their imagination and can now stretch ours.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Smart and Final Iris,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Ryan D. Poquette
Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English
and specializes in writing about various forms of
literature. In the following essay, Poquette explores
Tate’s use of polarities in his poem.
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In these times, when
the threat of nuclear war
was ever-present, hell could
be unleashed by the push of
a button.”
James Tate’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry is
marked by both comedy and surrealism—a mixing
of reality and fantasy that produces unusual scenes
that are often found only in dreams. Says Stephen
Gardner in his entry on Tate in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The poems themselves are rooted
in landscapes that are often—if not generally—
bizarre and surreal.” In “Smart and Final Iris,” Tate’s
use of comedy and surrealism reaches an apocalyptic level. Through the poem’s use of pattern and
word choice, Tate gives the reader a false sense of
security, setting the reader up for the climactic end
of the poem in which all sense of security is lost.
The poem follows an obvious pattern, employing polarities—or opposites—to trick the
reader into feeling that the Pentagon has everything
under control. In each of the first five stanzas, the
speaker in the poem gives a description of an apocalyptic situation that could happen in a post-nuclear
attack. These descriptions are followed by a “Pentagon code.” Whereas the description of the apocalyptic situation is very grim, the Pentagon codes,
by contrast, are light-hearted, sometimes surreal,
and even humorous, as if the Pentagon does not
take the situations seriously. By categorizing these
apocalyptic situations with such light-hearted
codes, the Pentagon gives themselves mental control over these post-nuclear possibilities.
The divide between grim reality and lighthearted code is emphasized even more by the style
of the text. The real situations are written in plain
text, while the Pentagon codes are all in italics,
drawing attention to them.
With or without italics, however, the codes
draw attention to themselves. As the poem progresses, the codes become ever more surreal and
humorous, playing off the real apocalyptic descriptions that they represent.
The first stanza introduces the idea of the Pentagon code:
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Pentagon code
for end of world
is rural paradise,
if plan fails
it’s rural paradise
Unlike the other stanzas, in which the code is
only featured once, this stanza features the code,
“rural paradise,” in two separate places. Poets use
repetition like this when they want to draw attention to a key idea or image. In this case, Tate is trying to impress upon the reader the idea of the end
of the world, and the finality that this idea brings
with it.
Apocalyptic landscapes are not usually described as either “rural” or as being a “paradise.”
But in Tate’s poem, the surreal images make sense
upon closer inspection. A rural area is usually fairly
unpopulated. By magnifying the idea of “rural” into
a “paradise,” or the ideal form, a “rural paradise”
becomes a world without any people at all—which
is what would happen if the world ended. The term
paradise is significant in another way. According
to Biblical history, the world’s first rural paradise,
the Garden of Eden, started with no people. So, it
is fitting that the paradise at the end of the world
would also have no people.
In the second stanza, “losses under 100 million,” is given the code of “a trip on the wayward
bus.” A “wayward bus” implies that somebody has
made a minor mistake and taken the wrong bus. In
a global nuclear war, under 100 million dead people would, in fact, be seen as a minor mistake, when
compared to the total amount of people who could
have potentially been killed.
It is in the next stanza that Tate hits his surrealistic and comic stride: “For a future of mutants, / bridal parties collide.” As with the previous codes, the words seem out of place at first.
However, when one starts to analyze the stanza
based on the “mutants” description, the words start
to fit. The “bridal parties” colliding provides a surrealistic image of several people in formal wear
who have been scrambled into mismatched body
parts and outfits during the nuclear attack, becoming mutants. It is a surreal image, yet one that elicits a small laugh on the part of the reader. “There’s
a nervous, high-strung humor which often seems
intended to bring forth an equally nervous titter
from the reader as reality and fantasy are deftly and
intricately intertwined,” says Stanley Wiater, in an
interview in the Valley Advocate in 1984.
The next stanza is even more surreal and comical: “World famine is / a plague of beatniks.” Al-
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though there is nothing funny about famine, or
hunger, it is amusing to imagine a horde of beatniks, considered a type of “starving artist,” roaming the earth.
In these first four stanzas, the poem’s pattern
of offsetting serious descriptions with increasingly
humorous images makes the reader feel as if there
is nothing to worry about—the Pentagon has everything under control. With the next stanza, however,
Tate changes tactics and disorients his reader, shaking the reader’s confidence in the Pentagon:
First strike and
I sniff your nieces
I fall to pieces
Get hell out . . .
This unusual language does not readily invoke
any humorous images as the other codes do, but it
does grab the reader’s attention through several of
the words. Up until now, the Pentagon codes have
been described in an impersonal fashion by an unseen speaker, allowing the reader to distance themselves from the horrors being described in the
poem. This code, however, yanks the reader back
to reality, and pulls them into the action by using
the personal “I,” and by addressing the reader directly by talking about their family members (“your
nieces”). Suddenly, more seems to be at stake, and
nobody is laughing. The pattern of this stanza
yields even more insights. As the stanza progresses,
the lines get shorter and shorter, invoking the image of the types of countdowns generally used to
launch nuclear weapons. Something bad is definitely happening.
At this point, the normally vivid, concise codes
have deteriorated into desperate thoughts. “I sniff
your nieces” alludes to the fact that after a nuclear
bomb has struck, you can smell the stench of those
of the dead who aren’t totally obliterated, which
may include a reader’s family. In a similar style, “I
fall to pieces” indicates that the Pentagon staff and
their carefully laid out plans are crumbling. Finally,
“Get hell out . . .” is a curious positioning of words.
Normally, one would use the phrase “get the
hell out” to talk about evacuation during a nuclear
attack. However, without the word “the,” the line
instead becomes a directive to the Pentagon to unleash hell. In other words, a counterstrike. The finality of such a move is underscored by the ellipsis at the end of this line, which implies that the
counterstrikes will continue indefinitely until
everything is gone, blown into oblivion. This is the
beginning of the end.
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The word “hell” itself is important and has been
used many times by writers throughout history to
describe the horrors of war. In the 1980s, the United
States and the Soviet Union were locked in a tense
standoff known as the Cold War, where each superpower hovered over its respective buttons for
launching nuclear weapons, just waiting for the sign
that its adversary was going to attack. In these times,
when the threat of nuclear war was ever-present,
hell could be unleashed by the push of a button.
After all of the Pentagon codes that offset the
realistic descriptions, and the three-line code that
announces the devastation of a “first strike,” the
last stanza serves to blindside the reader with a
sense of dread. There is no humorous or surreal
code to offset the final situation, where “a madman
comes.” During the Cold War, the Soviet Union
was the primary enemy of the United States, but
there also existed a number of smaller countries
who had access to nuclear weapons, and these
countries were sometimes run by people who were
considered “mad.”
“Smart and Final Iris” was “written at the
height of Reaganism,” says Chris Stroffolino in his
entry on Tate in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. During this time, Tate turned “toward society and sociopolitical themes,” according to
Stroffolino. One of these themes was how nuclear
war was ever-present, and how the United States
was encouraging it through certain actions or inactions.
In Tate’s poem, these smaller countries, the
“babies,” are viewed as more dangerous than the
Soviet Union superpower, which is locked in a
stalemate with the United States. Unfortunately, superpowers sometimes failed to realize the potential
power of smaller countries with less resources, and
so would “kick” them aside, not giving them a second thought, or investing minimal resources to keep
them contained—saving the majority of time and
effort for the larger adversary. The problem is that
the more these countries were kicked aside and out
of the Pentagon’s view, the larger they got and the
more dangerous they became.
This is ironic in a society that is supposed to
have some of the world’s best intelligence officers.
In fact, the title itself,“Smart and Final Iris,” plays
off the supposed intelligence of the Pentagon. The
“Smart” refers to the highly intelligent people who
work for the Pentagon, who think that they are prepared for anything. In the poem, however, they are
stripped of their confidence, but not before hell is
unleashed, in the form of nuclear war. Says Strof-
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folino, “Smart and Final Iris’ deals with helplessness in the face of the doublespeak of ‘Pentagon
code.’”
The inability for the Pentagon to realize that
they have missed a much more serious threat than
the Soviet Union—and start focusing their intelligence efforts where they need to be—will eventually bring about the “Final Iris.” The iris is the part
of a human’s eye that one sees on the outside,
through which the world is viewed, so a “final iris”
can be thought of as a “final” view or image.
In Tate’s surreal poem, “Smart and Final Iris,”
the poet uses specific patterns and word choices to
convince the reader that the Pentagon knows all
they need to about the threats of potential nuclear
war and how to handle them. As the poem progresses, Tate builds up this confidence, then suddenly disorients readers, showing them that the
“smart” guys aren’t always smart, and the final iris,
or view, may be reserved for a madman.
Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “Smart and Final Iris,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Allen, Dick, Review of Reckoner, in Hudson Review, 1987,
p. 510.
Gardner, Stephen, “James Tate,” in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II,
First Series, edited by Donald J. Greiner, Gale Research,
1980, pp. 318–22.
Gery, John, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of Nothingness, University Press of Florida,
1996.
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Nicholas Humphrey, eds., In a Dark
Time, Harvard University Press, 1984.
McNamara, Robert, “Mutual Deterrence,” http://www
.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence.shtml (July 13, 2001).
Stroffolino, Chris, “James Tate,” in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume 169: American Poets Since World War
II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte, Gale Research,
1996, pp. 275–83.
Tate, James, The Lost Pilot, Yale University Press, 1967.
—, Reckoner, Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Tate, James, and David Lehman, eds., The Best American
Poetry 1997, Scribner, 1997.
Upton, Lee, “The Masters Can Only Make Us Laugh,” in
South Atlantic Review, 1990, pp. 78–86.
Wiater, Stanley, “Interview,” in Valley Advocate, January 4,
1984.
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Further Reading
Bellamy, Joe David, ed., American Poetry Observed, University of Illinois Press, 1988.
This volume of interviews is unusual because wellknown contemporary poets interview other wellknown contemporary poets. As a result, the exchange
is substantive and focused.
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Nicholas Humphrey, eds., In a Dark
Time, Harvard University Press, 1984.
Psychiatrists Lifton and Humphrey have collected excerpts from literature of the last 2,500 years that comments on the psychological and imaginative confusion surrounding war. Lifton is known for his
psychological studies of survivors of the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombings.
Tate, James, The Route As Briefed, University of Michigan
Press, 1999.
This volume collects Tate’s short stories, interviews,
and essays. It is an engaging, accessible, and humorous collection.
Tate, James, and David Lehman, The Best American Poetry
1997, Scribner, 1997.
Each year, a different poet is invited to guest edit a
new volume in this popular series. Tate selected the
poems for this volume, and his selections can tell
readers as much about his own taste as his own poetry can. Tate’s introduction, “Live Yak Pie,” provides insights into his composing process and his vision of what poetry can be.
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What Belongs to Us
“What Belongs to Us” is included in Marie Howe’s
first book, The Good Thief (1988), which Margaret
Atwood picked for the National Poetry Series Award
in 1987. In twenty long free-verse lines, the poem
lists things that people can never really own, including phone numbers, memories, other people, the
past and, ironically, their own pain. Howe’s primary
theme is the transitory nature of human life, the idea
that “all things must pass.” Rather than making abstract metaphysical comments on life, however,
Howe piles up images to make her point. The cumulative “weight” of her list hits readers, so they reconsider exactly what it is they do own, if anything.
Many of the poems in the collection are of a spiritual nature, as is the tone of “What Belongs to Us.”
Although the speaker uses personal memories to
make her claim, memories accessible only to her,
she universalizes her experience, suggesting that all
people have similar memories. She does this to emphasize the idea that individual identity is illusory
and that individual human consciousness is part of
a larger cosmic consciousness. This notion is rooted
in Eastern religious traditions, and in the American
poetic tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt
Whitman, among others.
Marie Howe
1987
Author Biography
Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New
York, the oldest of nine children. Telling stories
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U s
was a way of life for her family and the household
of eleven people assured her of a ready audience.
Raised Catholic, she attended the Sacred Heart
Convent School, where Howe says the nuns modeled what it meant to live a spiritually active and
politically engaged life. After taking a bachelor of
science degree from the University of Windsor,
Howe had a short career as a journalist in
Rochester, writing for a few local papers. She did
not begin taking herself seriously as a poet until
she turned thirty, after attending a poetry workshop
for high school teachers with Karen Pelz at Dartmouth College. She credits that workshop with
changing her life. A few years later, she enrolled
in Columbia’s master of fine arts program, where
she studied with Stanley Kunitz.
Howe soon began publishing in literary journals
and magazines, and, in 1989, Margaret Atwood chose
Howe’s book The Good Thief as a winner in the National Poetry Series. Howe also received the Peter
Lavan Younger Poet Prize from the Academy of
American Poets for the book. Many of the collection’s poems, such as “What Belongs to Us,” tackle
themes of loss, memory, and love, and the impermanence of individual identity. Howe, whose
brother, John, died of AIDS, has also co-edited a collection of essays on the disease, In the Company of
My Solitude: American Writing and the AIDS Pandemic, with Michael Klein. Her most recent collection of poems is What the Living Do (1997) and was
named one of the five best books of poetry published
in 1997 by Publishers Weekly. Howe has received
fellowships from the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, Radcliffe College’s
Bunting Institute, The St. Botolph Foundation, The
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence
College in New York.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–5
“What Belongs to Us” is a list poem, the subject of which is signaled by the title. Think of how
lists are made, with a subject such as “Stuff to do
on the house,” or “Chores.” However, Howe inverts
the subject, and instead of listing “what belongs to
us,” she lists what doesn’t belong “to us,” “us” being humanity. She begins the poem with an item
familiar to most readers: memorized phone numbers. On a literal level, the reader can’t own the
numbers because they are someone else’s numbers.
On another level, they are a product of memory and
circumstance, both of which change with time (i.e.,
people lose their memories, and people move and
get new phone numbers). The “short cuts home”
also don’t belong to people, as the short cuts exist
outside of them, and the childhood summer she remembers is long gone, a thing of the past. The simile “shimmers like pavement” makes a comparison
between how pavement shimmers in the sun and
how the memory shimmers in the speaker’s mind.
The last item in the list, the “tiny footprints in the
back files,” also refers to a childhood event: children’s footprints in a medical file or children innocently walking over their parents’ things. These images border on the sentimental and the cute.
Lines 6–10
The items in these lines refer to things in the
public domain. Historical information such as a list
of kings does not belong to anyone because, para-
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Media
Adaptations
• American University in Washington, D.C., has
two audiocassettes of Howe reading her poems.
The first is a recording of Howe reading with
Allen Barnett, recorded in 1991, and is part of
the university’s Visiting Writer Series. The second was recorded in 1998 and is also part of the
writer’s series.
• The English Department of The State University of New York at Brockport sponsors readings by and discussions with poets in The Brockport Writers Forum. All of these readings and
discussions are videotaped and archived. In
1988 Stan Sanvel Rubin hosted a session with
Howe, in which she discusses the craft of poetry. The tape order number is V–447.
doxically, it belongs to everyone. These items also
appear to be from her childhood. The list of kings
is information the speaker probably had to remember for school. Charlemagne (742–814) refers
to Charles the Great or Charles I, the Frankish king
(768–814) and emperor of the West (800–814).
Charlemagne organized the beginnings of the Holy
Roman Empire. Henry refers to Henry VIII
(1491–1547) of Britain, the second son of Henry
VII and Elizabeth of York. The boxes under the
bed are a staple of many children’s “secret life,”
and Tommy’s wedding day is an event she witnessed and remembers in great detail. The image
of her waving to Mark and him waving back suggests the idea not only of greeting, but of parting
as well. It is also an image packed with the
speaker’s self-consciousness, as it demonstrates her
awareness of her awareness. The tenth line is perhaps the most mysterious in the poem. Though
there is no explicit reference, it suggests a baptismal ceremony, or perhaps Hindus stepping into
the Ganges River for healing and worship.
Lines 11–16
The “I” enters the poem for the first time in
these lines when the speaker announces she has a
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photograph, as if a photograph were the perfect evidence that something occurred in the past, and that
occurrence could still be owned. The “you” is never
named, but readers now understand that the poem
is addressed to this “you.” Lines 13–16 describe
the photograph, what it does and does not show.
The description, again, evokes the speaker’s selfconsciousness. That the two people are “in motion / not looking at each other, smiling” emphasizes the emotional distance between human
beings, even those close to one another. It underscores the existential idea that human beings are
born alone and die alone.
Lines 17–20
In these lines, the speaker picks up with her
list of what does not “belong to us.” The “we” refers
to the speaker and the person in the photograph. By
the speaker’s description, readers can assume that
the two are very close, perhaps siblings or close
childhood friends. The last item listed is the blisters on the speaker’s arm. She claims that not even
they belong to her. This idea underscores the motif of self-consciousness in the poem, as it positions
the speaker outside of her body, being in it but not
of it. The last word in the poem, “Look,” performs
a similar function, as it abruptly ends the list of descriptions with a startling command.
Themes
Loss
“What Belongs to Us” evokes the idea of loss,
even as it suggests that the very idea of possessing
anything is an illusion. In item after item, Howe
hammers away at the notion that attachment to
things defines human beings. By questioning the
validity of worldly attachment as a means of comforting oneself, Howe implicitly suggests that it is
only by renouncing the worldly that human beings
can find true peace. That the speaker of the poem
has achieved a kind of spiritual peace is evident in
the last line of the poem, when, apparently, she has
separated herself from even physical pain.
Nostalgia
Howe’s poem both exhibits a persistent nostalgia and emphasizes the idea that such thinking
only leads to grief. Nostalgia is a longing for the
past, and more specifically defined, a severe homesickness. Marketers, artists, writers, and poets
evoke nostalgia to capture audience attention and
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Make a list of the things in your life that are
most important to you, and then give them a
value on a scale of 1–5, 5 being the highest and
1 the lowest. Next, categorize them. For example, you might use the categories of material and
non-material things. What does this list tell you
about your own value system?
• Write a poem about a photograph from your
childhood. What does the poem tell you that the
photo does not, and vice versa?
• Research the doctrine of non-attachment in Buddhism. How does it apply to Howe’s poem?
• Free write about some of your strongest memories from childhood. Next, talk to some of the
people who were part of those childhood
events, and ask them what, if anything, they remember about the same event. Write an essay
exploring the differences between versions of
the events.
• Compare the idea of belonging in Howe’s poem
with the idea of belonging in Mark Strand’s
poem, “From a Litany.” Discuss similarities in
tone and meaning. Strand’s poem can be found
sell their products, whether they are beer, cars, or
poems. By presenting a list of her childhood memories, specific in their detail, the speaker implicitly
highlights their importance in her own life. Rather
than embrace these memories, however, the
speaker uses them to show that they are mere representations of events that will never return. In
essence, she has it both ways: she expresses nostalgia while at the same time renouncing it.
in his collection Darker and in his Selected
Poems.
• Many Western religions assume that human beings have a core or center that makes them who
they are. Do you agree with this? Why or why
not? Provide examples to support your position.
• Interview at least six people, asking them when
they are most aware of their bodies, and when
they are most unaware of them. What do the answers have in common? How do they differ?
• Sit in an upright position, with your legs folded
in front of you, back unsupported. Concentrate
on your breathing and try to eliminate all
thoughts floating through your mind. Do this for
ten minutes. Write down your responses to this
exercise in a journal. Repeat this exercise twice
a day for two weeks, tracking the changes in
your attitude and thinking.
• Write a poem to a friend or a lover, referring to
incidents or events known only to the two of
you. Now, rewrite the poem for an audience that
knows neither of you. What did you change and
why?
those features conventionally used to establish individual human identity do not belong to individuals at all, but are constructs used to categorize and
name human experience.
Style
List
Identity
The notion that human beings possess identity,
that is, something that belongs only to them and
makes them who they are, is an assumption undergirding Christianity and much of the political
and economic foundation of Western countries.
Howe questions this assumption, suggesting that
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By constructing the poem as a list, Howe is
able to evoke ideas and emotions through repetition. Auxesis is the cataloging of a series that closes
at the zenith, or high point, of the set. In Howe’s
case, that “zenith” of the set is her own pain. Not
even it belongs to her. In its structure, Howe’s
poem also resembles a litany. Litanies can be
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1987: The World Health Organization reports
that 8% of all pregnant Zairean women and 17%
of Zairean blood donors are AIDS infected.
Today: A cumulative total of 12.1 million
African children have lost either their mother or
both parents to AIDS, according to UNAIDS (a
United Nations’ organization), and thus are regarded as “AIDS orphans.” A recent report by
the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) puts the number of such orphans currently living in 26 African countries at 6.5 million, and projects that by 2010, there will be 15
million African AIDS orphans, including 2.7
million in Nigeria, 2.5 million in Ethiopia, and
1.8 million in South Africa.
• 1987: Prince William Arthur Philip Louis, first
son of Prince Charles of Wales and Princess Di-
prayers consisting of a series of invocations or supplications, or more simply a repetitive chant. Another prayer-like element of the poem is its focus
on the relationship between mind and body. Other
poets who have used lists extensively in their poetry to comment on mind-body issues include Walt
Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski, and
Mark Strand.
Tone
The tone of Howe’s poem is elegiac. Elegies
are poems or songs that mourn the loss of something or someone. Although “What Belongs to Us”
doesn’t mourn an individual, it does evoke a sense
of loss, nostalgia, and sorrow. Much of this emotion, however, is in response to the speaker’s sense
that very little belongs to her, rather than sadness
over the larger losses of humanity in general.
Diction and Audience
Howe’s poem uses prose-like rhythms and
everyday speech. She “speaks” matter-of-factly,
using little figurative language. She addresses a
specific (unnamed) and absent person, and readers
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ana, enrolls in Wetherby School in London, and
is a pupil there until July 1990.
Today: Prince William has been accepted by the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he
will study the history of art. He will begin his fouryear course in autumn 2001. He is first in line after Prince Charles to become King of England.
• 1987: The largest stock-market drop in Wall
Street history occurs on “Black Monday”—
October 19, 1987—when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 508.32 points, losing
22.6% of its total value.
Today: The great bull market of the 1980s and
1990s comes to an end, as technology stocks
lead the markets lower. Analysts place much of
the blame on the “bubble” (i.e., inflated prices)
in internet stocks.
are in the position of overhearing a “conversation.”
This practice of addressing an absent person is
called apostrophe, and it has a long tradition in
Western poetry. The references she makes are familiar to the person she is addressing, but not to
readers. This is in keeping with Howe’s poetics.
David Daniel quotes Howe as saying about her poetry, “Poetry is telling something to someone. . . .
It’s between them. It can’t happen alone, without
being said aloud. It’s physical, social, erotic.”
Historical Context
1980s and Materialism
Howe’s poem was written during the Reagan
administration of the mid-1980s, when acquiring
wealth and material things had become almost a religion to many Americans. Although she makes no
explicit references to public historical events, the
speaker does recount personal history. The nostalgia these memories illustrate, along with Howe’s
age, mark her as a Baby Boomer, that is, one born
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between 1946 and 1964 (Howe was born in 1950).
In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, decades defined
by Americans’ pursuit of spiritual and political action, the 1980s were characterized by an ethic focused on consumption and acquisition of material
things. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United
States had experienced a recession, but pulled out
of it under Reagan’s policies of deregulation, which
ignited a bull market. The growing economy lasted
until the beginning of 2000.
Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street illustrates the
widespread obsession with making money during
this time. Baby boomers, many of who had renounced the values of capitalism in the 1960s and
1970s, helped fuel the market boom, as they
climbed the career ladder, bought houses, and
poured money into 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts. Newsweek dubbed boomers who
now focused on their careers and achieving the
American Dream “yuppies” (young urban professionals), and defined them as people between the
ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine, with incomes
of at least $40,000, who were professionals and
managers. On October 19th, 1987, what has come
to be known as “Black Monday,” the stock market
crashed. The financial industry was hit hard, and
many people were laid off. This proved to be a
small hiccup, however, in the bull market, which
continued its run shortly thereafter.
The emergence and rapid spread of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) during the
1980s into a worldwide epidemic deepened the
sense of mortality for people throughout the world.
Although the disease was identified in the early
part of the decade, it was only after celebrities such
as actor Rock Hudson died from AIDS complications that Americans began to take the disease seriously. Prompted by the fact that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, Americans underwent a
wholesale change in sexual behavior. The gay community was especially hard hit, as a disproportionate number of gay men contracted and died from
the disease.
Critical Overview
Because Howe has authored only two collections of
poems, there has been little criticism written about
her work. The cover of Howe’s collection carries
these words by Margaret Atwood, who chose The
Good Thief for the National Poetry Series: “These
poems are intensely felt, sparely expressed, and dif-
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ficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend
their own dark roots.” Under Atwood’s words are
those of Stanley Kunitz, Howe’s former teacher at
Columbia, and mentor. Kunitz writes, “Marie
Howe’s poetry is luminous, intense, and elegant,
rooted in an abundant inner life . . . In essence, she
is a religious poet, that rarity among writers of her
generation.” Reviewing the collection for The Partisan Review, Bonnie Costello also notes the poems’
religious orientation, saying that Howe, “may well
have a career as a poet of spiritual instruction.” Noting the poet’s tendency towards transcendence,
Costello writes, “Howe’s best poems refuse to make
the body the measure of the soul.” Rochelle Ratner,
while praising the collection as a whole, questions
the accessibility of some of the poems. In her review for Library Journal, she argues that the poems embody a “fashionable surrealism,” but that
Howe could be more direct about the emotional issues from which they spring.
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Semansky is an instructor of English literature
and composition whose essays, poems, and stories
regularly appear in journals and magazines. In this
essay, Semansky considers the idea of belonging in
“What Belongs to Us.”
In “What Belongs to Us,” Howe explicitly questions human beings’ relationship to the world and
to themselves by examining assumptions under
girding notions of individuality and belonging. She
does this through questioning the ways in which
Western selfhood has been represented.
The idea of belonging is powerful. People belong to families, to jobs, to communities, to
churches. They believe in ideas, in things, in one
another, in order to be a part of something bigger
than them, to give their lives meaning and purpose.
Poet John Donne wrote that “No man is an island,”
meaning that people need one another to survive,
to prosper, to simply be. However, belonging isn’t
necessarily a choice that one makes. Human beings
can’t choose their parents or their genes, the country of their birth, their language, sex, or, some
might argue, their sexuality. By writing a poem
about all that does not belong to human beings,
Howe asks the reader to consider himself as a
process in flux, rather than a stable point in the
midst of changing world. In this sense, her poem
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is implicitly more interested in asking questions
about the importance of belonging and having,
rather than offering elaborate explanations for the
way things are.
If belonging is understood as meaning the
property of a person or thing, in what way can memories be said not to belong to people? Howe’s poem
makes this very claim as she enumerates memories
from her childhood and then disowns them. Howe
represents these memories differently, showing the
complications of living in a world where all experience is mediated by language. She lists memories
of words, numbers, and images, describes a photograph, and presents a physical wound, all to show
how they, in fact, do not constitute evidence of permanence or selfhood. Her images of the past evoke
a kind of dreamy netherworld, in which the speaker
grapples to keep the past alive. Howe draws on her
own memories to select incidents most readers can
not only see, but also empathize with. She renounces the “summer, shimmering like pavement,
when Lucia / pushed Billy off the rabbit house and
broke his arm.” The reader doesn’t know who Billy
and Lucia are, but he doesn’t need to. Most readers’ memories of childhood are made up of antics
like the ones Howe describes. They are so widespread that they are almost generic. Implicit in the
speaker’s renunciation of these memories is the idea
that, paradoxically, they do not make up her identity. It is paradoxical because the speaker obviously
still retains these memories, and describes them to
show that they are not a part of her and, by extension, that a reader’s memories may not be part of
them, either.
In the West, it is common to believe that one’s
memory makes up a large part of one’s identity,
and Westerners largely see identity as continuous,
coherent, and unified. Memories are part of the glue
of identity, and human beings use language to describe those memories. But memories by their very
nature, whether they be of a phone number or of
an event, are representations of something outside
of the individual human being, both in time and
space; they stand in for the original action or event.
In this sense, they do not belong to individuals, but
to an unrecoverable past. Memories do not belong
to human beings because they are processes, rather
than discrete things that can be held, touched, felt.
Memories are “jogged” by ideas, sights, sounds,
words, expressions, and circumstances, and so they
are also, to a large extent, random and unpredictable. They are contingent upon other people and
events for their very existence. “Short cuts home,”
which the speaker mentions in the second line, are
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Memories are part of
the glue of identity, and
human beings use language
to describe those memories.”
also a kind of memory, a memory that becomes a
physical habit.
The objects of Howe’s renunciation are also
kinds of evidence for human presence, the idea that
individuals are separate, self-contained entities,
“belonging” to themselves, and conscious of themselves. Evidence is a form of representation. Semioticians define and often categorize the relationship
between a thing and what it represents into three
categories: icon, symbol, and index. An iconic representation, for example, might be a statue of a
woman. The statue stands for the woman because
it resembles her in some way. A symbolic representation, however, is not based on resemblance,
but on convention, that is, a social agreement that
x will stand for whatever. Language is a form of
symbolic representation because there is no resemblance between a word and what it represents
unless people agree there is. Indexical representation is based on cause and effect. It indicates connectedness or physical proximity between something and something else. In making claims for all
that does not belong to human beings, Howe attempts to provoke the reader, to unsettle the
reader’s own sense of belonging to others, to the
world, to themselves. When she writes that not even
“our tiny footprints in the back files” belong to us,
she is questioning not only memory, but also the
continuity of human identity. As a form of indexical representation, these tiny footprints can be understood as evidence of someone’s presence. They
are the effect of a particular cause: small children
walking over paper. But the people to whom these
footprints belong no longer exist. They have grown
into adults, one of whom remembers the footprints
and writes down that memory (itself a representation) in words in a poem, creating an image in the
reader’s mind.
Photographs combine iconic and indexical representation. The photograph that Howe’s speaker
mentions is unusual because she cites it, paradoxically, as evidence of absence:
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I have, of course, a photograph:
you and I getting up from a couch.
Full height, I stand almost two inches taller than
you
but the photograph doesn’t show that,
just the two of us in motion
not looking at each other, smiling.
The “you,” a pronoun standing in for a noun,
is never named, but his presence in the photo allows the speaker to describe herself in relation to
him. Not only does the photograph not show the
true heights of the speaker and her companion, it
cannot show anything apart from what the speaker
describes. Words, in this case, are used to represent an image, an image to which the reader has no
access.
The introduction of the photograph also marks
the introduction of the speaking “I” in the poem,
as well as the “I”’s audience, “you.” Looking back
at the poem, the reader now sees that the “you”
would understand references to Lucia and Billy,
and the other childhood memories listed. This puts
the reader in a different position, as an eavesdropper on an intimate conversation between the
speaker and someone close to her.
Howe’s poem proceeds like this, in an infinite
regress of representation, of words standing in for
memories standing in for images, and so on. No
thing exists by itself, but is always contingent upon
some other thing, or person, some other words.
Buddhists have a name for this idea of relationality: emptiness. In his study, Buddhism without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor writes, “Emptiness does
not describe how . . . things exist; it merely describes how they are devoid of an intrinsic, separate being.” Batchelor argues that the more people
try to latch onto the idea of the self, defining it,
protecting it, naming it, the more they create anguish for themselves, for the self is no one thing,
but a system of interacting processes and circumstances. He writes:
We have been created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that have preceded us.
From the patterning of the DNA derived from our
parents to the firing of the hundred billion neurons
in our brains to the cultural and historical conditioning of the twentieth century to the education and upbringing given us to all the experiences we have ever
had and choices we have ever made: these have conspired to configure the unique trajectory that culminates in this present moment.
This moment too, must pass, and that’s what
Howe’s poem wants the reader to grasp. Instead of
seeing oneself as separate from others, from nature,
from time and space itself, identifiable as this or
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that kind of person, her poem asks the reader to
think of themselves as part of cosmic consciousness, as transient accumulations of cells, thoughts,
air, water, earth, already beginning to break down
and become something else. Her speaker demonstrates an eerie separation from even her own body,
when she holds forth her blistered arm for her companion to see, as if her own wound were evidence
of her non-attachment to the world.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “What Belongs
to Us,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Adrian Blevins
Blevins is an essayist and poet who has taught
at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in
the Virginia Community College system. In this essay, Blevins argues that a study of the discursive
mode in Howe’s poem reveals that idea, when married to image and music, may bring the beauties of
image and music into very sharp focus.
By articulating a preference for the concrete and particular over the abstract, poets like William Carlos
Williams and Ezra Pound made the image reign
supreme in twentieth-century American poetry. A
desire “to grasp the fluid, absolutely particular life
of the physical world,” as the American poet and
critic Robert Pinksy says of the modernist preference for the image in The Situation of Poetry, requires a preference for the descriptive mode of discourse. In the descriptive mode, writers avoid
abstraction and statement, choosing instead to present feelings, thoughts, observations, and sensations
by using similes, metaphors, and other figures of
speech to construct the visual pictures we call images. While there can be no doubt that images are
essential to poetry, in recent years some poets have
begun to realize that a preference for the descriptive
mode has dominated American poetry to the point
of injury. One such American poet is Marie Howe.
The descriptive mode describes the way that
poets or writers use concrete terms (like roses) to
ornament and present abstract ideas (like love). The
narrative mode describes people moving through
time, and the effects their actions have on the world
around them. In the discursive mode, poets tell
readers what is happening, rather than showing
them, through the use of analysis, exposition, or
rhetoric. An exploration of Marie Howe’s “What
Belongs to Us” must partly be an exploration of the
way the discursive mode works in some of current
American poetry since so much of the poem is
made up of ideas, rather than things, and is told,
rather than shown.
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“What Belongs to Us” explores the allusive nature of childhood and—by extension—of all experience. It investigates the speaker’s memory of her
childhood by listing the memories and bodies of
knowledge that can’t be possessed, or owned. In
other words, the poem makes a dreamy statement
about the way hindsight or retrospect can turn the
act of remembering into a nonspecific and therefore spiritual enterprise. Howe’s use of the discursive mode contributes to the poem’s ambiguity
since ideas are automatically abstract. The sense of
ambiguity in Howe’s poem makes the old and common experience of remembering childhood unfamiliar to us: it reinvigorates an ordinary act by placing it into a poetic space that is hazy and indefinite
and in so doing does what poems should do with
recollected experience. The poem’s first line—
“Not the memorized phone numbers”—expresses
not a phone number, but the fact that the “memorized phone numbers,” according to the title, do not
“belong to us.” The poem’s second line refers to a
part of childhood that also cannot be possessed and
is an idea in the sense that it does not present a
“carefully rehearsed short [cut] home” so much as
state that those paths, as well, are not to be possessed. In other words, the first two lines of “What
Belongs to Us” are completely discursive.
In the discursive mode, a poet’s voice and
unique system of thought can dominate a poem:
statements expressing ideas, while abstract, tell us
how speakers think more directly than images do.
By beginning in the discursive mode, Howe establishes the authority of her voice. An authoritative
and emphatic voice is especially important in an
expression of vague, unsupported ideas. That is, if
readers are going to accept the initial premise of a
poem that begins in the discursive mode, they will
do so because of the tone of the speaker’s voice,
rather than because of anything specific the speaker
says or reveals about her skill with image and music. Although the speaker doesn’t tell us much in
her first two lines, she does establish a certain kind
of authority over her subject matter by using the
statement’s inherent emphatic tone. That tone is
necessary because there are no images—there’s not
even music—to make the first two lines compelling.
The poem moves from its discursive opening
to a use of the descriptive mode in stanza three.
That stanza opens with an actual image—“Not the
summer, shimmering like pavement”—and then
moves to a memory about someone named “Lucia,” who “pushed Billy off the rabbit house and
broke his arm.” The image in this stanza demands
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Howe’s movement in
‘What Belongs to Us,’
from the discursive to the
imagistic to the lyrical and
back again, has enacted the
idea that memory is more
motion than image.”
attention and is thereby able to slow down the
poem’s movement forward. That is, since the
poem’s first two lines present no visuals or experience for the senses, the reader welcomes the image in the poem’s third line that the “summer [is]
shimmering like pavement.” The alliteration of the
/s/ sound in “summer” and “shimmering” contributes to the power of this image. It’s also interesting to note how different the “summer, shimmering” image is from the actual memory about
Lucia in this stanza. Although the Lucia memory
produces a kind of picture, it does not work like
the image made with the simile. It is more discursive in the sense that it makes a statement: it records
a fact and therefore does not come from the imagination like the second stanza’s image does. The
tension between the “summer, shimmering” image
and the less-imagistic, but visual line about Lucia
reveals that a constant movement between the various modes of discourse can help give a poem energy.
The poem’s fifth line—“or our tiny footprints
in the back files”—combines both fact and imagination. That is, the children in the speaker’s family probably had, on their birth certificates, “tiny
footprints in the back files” of a doctor’s office, but
because the rhythm in this line takes great advantage of the hard stresses of monosyllabic words—
every word but “footprints,” which might also be
read as containing two hard stresses, is monosyllabic—it is much more musical than the discursive
lines that opened the poem. The repetition of the
/i/ sound in “tiny” and “files” and alliteration in
“footprints” with “files” contributes, as well, to this
stanza’s music. The tension between the lack of
music in the poem’s first two lines and the gradually increasing music, or lyricism, in it serves to increase the poem’s pacing, or suspense.
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism without Beliefs
(1997) provides an accessible introduction to the
principles and values underlying Buddhism,
without the accompanying religious dogma.
• Howe’s The Good Thief (1988) contains the
poem “What Belongs to Us,” along with thirtythree other poems. Readers could benefit from
reading the entire book to develop a strong sense
of how the poem fits into the collection.
• Howe has edited, with Michael Klein, In the
Company of My Solitude: American Writing
from the AIDS Pandemic, published by Persea
in 1995. Howe’s brother, John, died of AIDS.
• For an innovative look at 1980s’ conservatism,
read Michael X. Caprini’s 1986 book entitled
Change in American Politics: The Coming of
Age of the Generation of the 1960s.
• Matthew Rettenmund’s 1996 book entitled Totally Awesome 80s: A Lexicon of the Music,
Videos, Movies, TV Shows, Stars, and Trends of
That Decadent Decade, is the first pop reference
work on the 1980s.
The poem progresses as it had begun, listing
in the negative what cannot “belong” to the speaker
and her siblings in stanzas made of one and two,
often end-stopped, lines. In the poem’s sixth line,
the author moves to a more discursive statement
with “Not the lists of kings from Charlemagne to
Henry.” This line is discursive because a list is
more of an idea than an object. But notice that
Howe will not express ideas for long without making music to counteract them. The alliteration in
“not the boxes under our beds” in the poem’s sixth
line works to save the Charlemagne line from becoming too flat. Then, in a stanza much like the
poem’s third stanza, we move to another memory
of “Tommy’s wedding day when it was so hot and
Mark played the flute / and we waved at him waving from the small round window in the loft.” The
sound play in this stanza is as noticeable as was the
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image about the “summer, shimmering like pavement.” Again, because there has been discursive
language leading up to that line in lines like “Not
the list of kings from Charlemagne to Henry,” the
music here comes into sharp focus. The alliteration
of the /w/ sound in “wedding,” “when,” “we,”
“waved,” “waving,” and “window” is picked up
again in the poem’s tenth line, when Howe writes
about “the great gangs of people stepping one by
one into the cold water.” The music in these two
lines is really very stunning. Not only does the /w/
sound in “water” rhyme with that sound in the
poem’s eighth and ninth lines, the alliteration of
the guttural /g/ sound in “great gangs” is countered
by the many long and short /o/ sounds in the line,
as well.
The movement from the use of the discursive
mode in the poem’s first two lines to the descriptive mode in the poem’s third line in the image
about the summer to the intensely lyrical music in
the poem’s eighth, ninth, and tenth lines works almost the way suspense would in a narrative poem.
That is, Howe’s progression from a flatly discursive line to a more imaginative line to a more musical line gives the poem its energy and increasingly fervent tone. In so doing, Howe mimics the
way the emotions that memories elicit gradually increase in feeling and heat.
“What Belongs to Us” turns, much like a sonnet, in its eleventh line, with a shift from the catalogue of statements to a specific memory about a
certain photograph. Structurally, this movement imitates the increased heat or fervor because it moves
from the general (the list of what can’t belong) to
the specific (this very photograph). The reader finds
out in line 12 that the poem is addressed to the person who is “getting up from a couch” in a photograph. Although the speaker doesn’t give us the
identity of the person she’s addressing, the reader
can assume from the poem’s context that the person is a sibling. This information increases the
poem’s intimacy since suddenly the reader realizes
he is eavesdropping on a private conversation. Although the reader may be curious about what, if anything, does belong to the speaker, stanza nine offers
no such clues. It is as negative as are the poem’s
first ten lines. That is, the poet describes not so much
what the photograph shows as what the photograph
“doesn’t show,” which is that the speaker “stand[s]
almost two inches taller” than the person she’s addressing. This stanza reinforces the conflict between
what adults remember of childhood and the actual
objects people use to record their memories. In other
words, people cannot own photographs any more
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than they can own “the carefully rehearsed short
cuts home” or the “list of kings from Charlemagne
to Henry.” What the photograph does record is “just
the two of us in motion / not looking at each other,
smiling.” What the photograph does reveal is just a
sense of movement, of motion, that Howe suggests
in this poem is the essence of the act of remembering.
Howe returns to her catalogue in the seventeenth line, reinforcing the poem’s overall catalogue shape. Here the reader gets another list of
what does not belong to the speaker and the sibling she’s addressing. The lines in these stanzas are
much like the poem’s opening lines—they are empathic statements that present very little. The reader
is offered the vague image of two children “leaning against the kitchen counter,” but is not told what
the children look like. The poem’s eighteenth line
contains another specific memory, of an occasion
on which the speaker “burned [her] arm.” The other
child in the photograph—the “you” of the poem—
said, “oh, you’re the type / that even if it hurt, you
wouldn’t say.” This statement says more about the
speaker than the person to whom the poem is addressed, and reminds the reader that poems using
the discursive mode can point backwards to their
speakers in psychologically significant ways.
The memory of the burn moves the reader to
the poem’s last line, a reference to blisters. The imperative “look” in this last line makes a demand on
both the person the speaker addresses and the
poem’s readers. It is a fragment of one word, a verb,
and ironically recalls what people do when they experience the world with the sense of sight, which
is often what they do when they experience poetic
images. After a long catalogue of the memories that
cannot be owned by children, the speaker demands
that the reader “look.” The reader supposes he is
being commanded to look at the photograph that
has just been mentioned. But that photograph offers nothing concrete to look at—just two children
“in motion, not looking at each other, smiling.”
Then the reader understands that he is being asked
to look at motion itself.
Howe’s movement in “What Belongs to Us,”
from the discursive to the imagistic to the lyrical
and back again, has enacted the idea that memory
is more motion than image. In so doing, it reveals
that poems that actively employ more than one
mode of discourse can be put into rhetorical forms
and modes that mimic content. For these and other
reasons, it seems clear that the discursive mode can
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be effective in poems; sometimes it can even make
the images and music poetry relies on even more
beautiful than they would otherwise be.
Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “What Belongs
to Us,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Adler, Jerry, “The Year of the Yuppie,” in Newsweek, December 31, 1984, pp. 14–24.
Batchelor, Stephen, Buddhism without Beliefs, Riverhead
Books, 1997.
Costello, Bonnie, Review of The Good Thief, in Partisan
Review, Vol. 56, No. 4, Fall 1989, p. 671.
Daniel, David, “About Marie Howe,” in Ploughshares, Volume 18, Issue 4, Winter 1992–1993, pp. 224–28.
Donne, John, “Meditation 17,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed, Vol. 1, W. W. Norton & Company,
p. 1107.
Howe, Marie, The Good Thief, Persea Books, 1988.
—, What the Living Do: Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Pinksy, Robert, The Situation of Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 3.
Ratner, Rochelle, Review of The Good Thief, in Library
Journal, Vol. 113, No. 13, August 1988, pp. 161–62.
Further Reading
Howe, Marie, and Christopher Tilghman, eds., Ploughshares Winter 1992–93: Voices from the Other Room,
Ploughshares Press, 1992.
Howe co-edited this special edition of the journal
Ploughshares, which features new and emerging poets and fiction writers. This is a good book to read
for an idea of Howe’s taste in literature. Contributors
include Michael Klein, Anne-Marie Levine, Fred
Marchant, Jeffrey McDaniel, Jane Mead, Malena
Morling, Suzanne Owens, Suzanne Paola, Candice
Reffe, and Martha Rhodes.
Prince, Ruth E. C., “The Impermeable Line: An Interview
with Marie Howe,” in Radcliffe Quarterly, Summer 1998.
Howe talks about her writing history and habits and
discusses her latest book, What the Living Do. This
issue also contains a few poems by Howe.
Sewell, Marilyn, Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of
Women’s Spirituality, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Sewell collects poetry by a variety of women, and
from a woman’s point of view, on topics including
marriage, death, birth, and loss.
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Wild Geese
Mary Oliver
1986
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“Wild Geese,” which first appeared in Mary
Oliver’s Dream Work, published in 1986, is one of
the poet’s most anthologized poems. It is also one
of her most arresting. In it, she explores the connection between the human mind, nature in general, and wild geese in particular. Oliver is well
noted for her poetry of the natural world, and she
often relates animals and varieties of plant life to
the human condition. Typical themes involve the
beauty and wonders of nature and how much better the world would be if people were more in tune
with it. In “Wild Geese,” she encourages the reader
to be more imaginative and to shed loneliness by
discovering his or her place “in the family of
things”—namely, the family of sun and rain,
prairies and trees, mountains, rivers, and, ultimately, wild geese flying home.
Although the premise of this poem may seem
simple, or even trite, the real gut of its message is
quite provocative. From its first line—rife with intriguing ambiguity—the poem draws the reader in
with a sense of immediacy and a keen awareness
of how “you” may be feeling and what “you” may
be thinking. This is a brief poem written in casual
language, but it still manages to be stimulating and
powerful. Not all poets can pull that off, but Oliver
is one of the noted few who can.
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Author Biography
Mary Oliver was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935.
Her father was a teacher and her mother a stay-athome mom. Oliver knew early on that she wanted
to be a writer, and her demeanor, even as a young
teen, was serious and determined. When she was
fifteen, she sent a letter to Norma Millay Ellis, the
sister of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, asking if she could visit Steepletop, Millay’s home in
upstate New York. Touched by the young girl’s admiration of her recently deceased sister, Ellis consented to the visit, and it became only the first of
several that Oliver would make to Steepletop.
Eventually, she was invited for an extended stay
during which time she helped to organize Millay’s
papers.
From 1955 to 1956, Oliver studied at Ohio State
University and then at Vassar from 1956 to 1957.
Without earning a degree, she left college and moved
to Provincetown, Massachusetts, a noted bohemian
community that had earlier attracted Edna St. Vincent Millay. All the while, Oliver had been writing
and publishing poetry. Millay’s influence was apparent in her work, but it also showed striking original ability for a young poet in her twenties. In 1963,
Oliver published her first full-length collection, No
Voyage, and Other Poems, which was reissued in an
expanded edition two years later. Oliver’s second collection, The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems, did
not come out until 1972, the same year she accepted
the position of chair of the creative writing department at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Other distinguished teaching positions followed:
poet-in-residence and visiting professor positions at
Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, the University of Cincinnati, and Sweet Briar
College. In 1996, Oliver became the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, where she remains today.
For over four decades, Oliver has been a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. She has
published some sixteen volumes and has received
several prestigious awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship,
and, for American Primitive, published in 1983, the
coveted Pulitzer Prize. Oliver followed this collection three years later with Dream Work, which contained the poem “Wild Geese.” In 1992, Oliver received yet another prestigious prize—a National
Book Award for New and Selected Poems—but this
acceptance ceremony marked a new era in the poet’s
life. On stage, she openly thanked supporters, in-
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Mary Oliver
cluding Molly Malone Cook, whom she called “the
light of my life.” Over the years, many readers and
critics had attempted to find evidence of Oliver’s lesbian lifestyle in her work, but this speech was the
first time she publicly referred to it. Ultimately,
Oliver’s sexual preference has made little or no difference in her literary endeavors, and she has remained out of any political spotlight concerning the
issue. She and Cook make their home in Vermont.
Poem Text
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you
mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the
rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue
air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
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Jesus spent in the desert without food or water, being tempted by Satan.
Lines 4–5
Media
Adaptations
• The World Wide Web offers one category
match, six web sites, and over four hundred web
pages related to Mary Oliver’s poetry, as of this
writing. Many of the pages contain the full text
of “Wild Geese,” as well as comments on it.
Lines 4 and 5 contain the first comparison of
the human being to the natural world. The speaker
claims that “your body” has a “soft animal” within
it, and that you need to let it “love what it loves.”
This idea of self-indulgence and personal pleasure
is directly opposed to the previous description of
self-abasement and repentance. Therefore, while
the first three lines tell you what you “do not have
to do,” these two lines explain what you “only”
have to do.
Line 6
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and
exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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Poem Summary
Line 1
The first line of “Wild Geese” is one that many
readers recall long after putting the poem aside. The
use of the second person “you” may seem generic
at first, but later in the poem, the reader understands
that he or she is the one directly addressed. This
line is ambiguous in meaning because one is not
sure if the speaker is saying that “You do not have
to be good” in the moral sense of good versus evil,
or whether one does not have to be good at doing
something. The first meaning is probably the one
most people believe is intended, and the next two
lines of the poem appear to verify it.
Lines 2–3
The religious connotation in lines 2 and 3 supports the notion that you do not have to be a “good”
person if you do not want to be. The “walk on your
knees” phrase implies someone praying or displaying worship, and the addition of “for a hundred
miles through the desert, repenting” implies suffering and a willingness to be punished for sinful
behavior. In general, the idea of crawling through
a desert on one’s knees infers humility and an acceptance that one must “pay” for future comfort
and happiness with present pain and sacrifice. More
specifically, the notion refers to the forty days that
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Line 6 now brings the reader specifically into
the poem. If the “you” seemed generic before, here
the direct address is unmistakable. Note how the
placement of the words in this line emphasizes the
address: “Tell me about despair, yours.” If the line
read, “Tell me about your despair,” think of how
much weaker, and perhaps still generic, the second
person would seem. As is, however, the speaker
makes a very poignant request, calling attention to
human despair and showing a strong willingness to
share stories of it with the reader in particular.
Lines 7–11
These five lines imply that despair is a strictly
human quality. While human beings may sit around
and bemoan their misfortunes and hopeless states,
“the world goes on.” The “world” here, however,
belongs to nature. It is the world of sun and rain
“moving across” earth’s various landscapes, “the
prairies and the deep trees, / the mountains and the
rivers.”
Lines 12–13
So far, the poem has addressed nature in somewhat general terms, but in these lines, a specific
animal is identified. Like the sun, rain, and landscapes, however, the wild geese are going about
their business, oblivious to human despair. The portrayal of a flock of geese flying “high in the clean
blue air” is a pleasant scene, one that humankind
could benefit from if people would pay more attention to the events in nature happening all around
them.
Line 14
Line 14 is another direct address to the reader,
and it is clear that at least one form of despair the
speaker fears “you” may be feeling is loneliness.
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Although the speaker may not know the reader personally, she says that “whoever you are,” if “you”
are lonely and despairing, this poem is for “you.”
Lines 15–16
In these lines, the speaker reveals the method
by which humans can relate to nature. The “world”
here may be either the natural world or the human
world, for both are available for whatever “your
imagination” would like to make of them. This does
not necessarily mean that people should live in imaginary worlds instead of trying to cope in the real one.
Instead, by being creative and thoughtful, individuals can start to appreciate things they may have previously ignored and to see the beauty in nature to
which they used to be blind. Line 16 compares the
world that awaits your imagination to the calls of the
wild geese, “harsh and exciting.” Although, the word
“harsh” typically has a negative connotation, here it
seems to imply only loud and determined.
Lines 17–18
The final two lines of “Wild Geese” are an assurance to readers that they are not alone in their
loneliness. The speaker implies that the world is
adamant about welcoming everyone into it, for it
calls out “over and over announcing your place /
in the family of things.” Here the “family” consists
of all of nature—the sun and rain, rivers and mountains, and every member of the animal kingdom,
including wild geese and human beings. One needs
only to have a receptive imagination to find a place
to belong.
Themes
G e e s e
Topics for
Further
Study
• Write an essay giving your interpretation of the
line “the world offers itself to your imagination”
from “Wild Geese.” Consider why the offer is
to “your imagination” instead of “your heart” or
“your mind” and explain the difference.
• Some people believe that there is such a thing
as “writing too much for too long”—that a poet
like Mary Oliver who has published more than
sixteen books, many of them with a similar
theme and subject matter, risks becoming stale.
How do you feel about it? When, if ever, is it
time for a writer to stop writing?
• Loneliness has been linked not only to mental
depression in humans, but also to various physical ailments as well. Read some research on the
subject and write an essay on one or two theories of overcoming loneliness. Do you have your
own theory that differs from the ones researchers
suggest?
• Rewrite the poem “Wild Geese” so that it begins with the opposite meaning of the real work.
That is, your first lines are, “You have to be
good / You have to walk on your knees,” and
so forth. At what point does it get difficult to
continue and why? Is the sentiment toward nature the same in your poem as it is in Oliver’s?
Why or why not?
Nature and Humankind
The reader does not have to know that Mary
Oliver is a nature poet to know that “Wild Geese”
is a nature poem. That fact resonates throughout
the work, as it compares nature’s condition to the
human condition. As with most poems that make
this comparison, nature comes out on top. One
should not dismiss the work as another tirade on
how bad people are and how good animals, plants,
mountains, and so forth are. The person addressed
here is lonely but not necessarily bad. Although the
speaker declares up front that “You do not have to
be good,” there is no indication that “you” are anything other than despairing and lonely. That description, of course, evokes more pity for the human condition than anger or animosity.
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“Wild Geese” is also different from many other
natural world vs. human world poems in its portrayal of nature’s response to humanity. Sometimes
poets describe nature as indifferent or superior to
people, essentially ignoring human suffering and
rebuffing any attempt by an individual to be more
compassionate about it. But in Oliver’s poem, nature—“the world”—is both sympathetic and welcoming to human beings. It uses the voices of wild
geese to call out to individuals in despair and to let
them know that there is a place for them in nature’s
family. The overall theme, then, is not that nature
is superior to humankind, but that humans could be
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just as content, just as carefree as nature if they
wanted to. This sentiment, obviously, oversimplifies the poem’s main premise, but the bottom line
is that the troubled human condition could be eased
somewhat by letting “your imagination” be more
creative and natural.
Hedonism
Hedonism is defined as the pursuit of things
that bring pleasure, especially pleasure to the
senses. The first five lines of “Wild Geese” suggest a favorable response to this philosophy. Although the first line may appear ambiguous, at least
one of its meanings is clear: you do not have to be
“good” in the religious or moral sense of showing
humility, contrition, and repentance as exemplified
throughout religious teachings. In other words, you
do not have to be like Jesus of the New Testament
who proved allegiance to God by spending forty
days in the desert refusing temptations by Satan.
Lines 4 and 5 capture the essence of the hedonistic belief that seeking personal, physical pleasure
should outweigh any spiritual endeavors. The
speaker implies that the surest avenue to happiness
is “to let the soft animal of your body / love what
it loves.” Animals, after all, do not think in terms
of morality or of good and evil. They simply follow their natural instincts, which are comprised of
built-in survival tactics. Staying alive is the goal of
wild geese, cows, elephants, oak trees, petunias,
and so on, but human beings must contend with
something more—something called a conscience.
It is unlikely that the intent of this theme is to promote abandoning the checks and balances that the
human conscience places on behavior in favor of
total self-indulgence and physical pleasure. It
seems apparent, however, that an occasional delve
into hedonism is recommended, at least for the sake
of relieving a bit of despair and loneliness.
Style
Lyric Poetry
Lyric poets attempt to appeal to human emotions and intellect without falling into pathos or
confessional poetry. Oliver’s soft, sensual tone
speaks directly to the reader, as though to create an
intimate bond for at least as long as she has the
reader’s attention. In “Wild Geese,” the lines are
unrhymed but still melodic in rhythm and repetition. Listen to the rhythm in the three lines that begin with “You”: “You do not have to be good,”
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“You do not have to walk,” “You only have to let.”
The same effect is heard in the three lines that begin with “Meanwhile”: “Meanwhile the world goes
on,” “Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles,”
“Meanwhile the wild geese.” Repeating the words
lends a quiet, hypnotic quality to the speaker’s
voice, luring the reader with its gentleness but at
the same time stimulating the intellect with their
meaning.
Oliver’s images are rarely provocative or surprising. Instead, she uses clear, simple language
that, alone, may not seem compelling, but crafted
into a complete work becomes seductive and rewarding. The image of a flock of wild geese sailing across the sky is not complex, but it is gratifying when set against the backdrop of sun and rain
“moving across the landscapes” of prairies and
forests and mountains. Oliver uses the same geese
image to describe the world calling out to lonely
people—again, not complex, but an intriguing
metaphor all the same. She may be called a poet of
understatement, but she can’t be labeled unsophisticated or dull. Instead, her traditional lyric style
maintains old-fashioned gracefulness while incorporating contemporary thought on nature and humanity. Perhaps Oliver says it best herself in “The
Swan” chapter from her semi-autobiographical
book, Winter Hours:
I want every poem to “rest” in intensity. I want it to
be rich with “pictures of the world.” I want it to carry
threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life
lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and
whimsy (not my life—not necessarily!—but the life
of my formal self, the writer).
Historical Context
The decade of the 1980s in America was dominated
by a cultural, social, and political turn toward conservatism. Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency,
beginning in 1980, marked a general shift in societal values, from the emphasis on social justice that
characterized the 1960s and 1970s, towards a concentration on individuality and material gain. Reagan’s agenda included reducing the size of the federal government and abolishing federal regulations
to free up business—big and small—to produce
mass quantities of goods and services for a highconsumption economy. On the social and cultural
level, a return to conservatism meant an attempt to
undo the counterculture lifestyle of previous years,
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1980s: In a blow to the previously fervent
Women’s Movement, the Equal Rights Amendment fails to be ratified. Afterwards, the movement falls into a period of upheaval with many
former supporters and members of the National
Organization of Women (NOW) abandoning the
cause, at least on the political level.
Today: An international consortium of genetic
researchers, collectively known as the Human
Genome Project, announce that they have completely mapped the genetic code of a human
chromosome, raising an abundance of medical,
legal, and ethical questions.
Today: Concerned Women for America
(CWA), with members in 50 states, is the largest
public policy women’s organization in the nation, surpassing NOW. Many American women
are more attracted to CWA’s discussion of such
issues as religious persecution around the world,
protecting children from pornography, breast
cancer prevention, and morality in America than
to NOW’s more political agenda, which deals
primarily with the empowerment of women.
• 1980s: The discovery of a hole in the Earth’s
protective ozone layer spurs an outcry from environmentalists who claim that modern
lifestyles and technology are destroying the
ecology that all life depends upon. The hole was
apparently caused by chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants drifting up into the atmosphere.
• 1980s: Researchers develop the first commercial application of recombinant DNA (or genetic
engineering) when they produce human insulin
for the treatment of diabetes. To provide insulin
in the quantities needed for medical use, they
isolate the gene that produces human insulin and
transfer it to bacteria. The bacteria multiply, producing the protein insulin as they grow.
Today: Most scientists agree that a recovery of
the ozone layer in many regions of the world
should be detected within the next fifteen to
forty-five years, based on full compliance with
the Montreal Protocol. The Protocol is an international agreement aimed at phasing out ozonedepleting chemicals, and most developed countries have adopted it. Many developing nations,
however, have not complied for economic reasons.
bringing back old-fashioned values and moral standards. For many Americans, this turn translated
into less tolerance for individuals and groups that
did not fit the prescribed right-wing model, including various racial and ethnic groups, feminists,
and gays and lesbians. Political factors that helped
support cultural conservatism included the failure
of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, large
funding cuts in social and affirmative action programs, an increase in antiabortion legislation, and
an initial disinterested response from government
toward AIDS—the new and devastating disease
that many Americans initially ignored, in the mistaken belief that it affected only homosexuals.
Oliver’s poetry reveals nothing about how it
may have been influenced by 1980s conservatism,
and her Dream Work collection, which came out in
the heart of the decade, does not appear to have
been based on a response to any right-wing backlashes, including those against the gay and lesbian
communities. Instead, Oliver’s work, then as before, centered on nature and the human relationship
to the natural environment.
Interestingly, the 1980s saw not only shifts in
social attitudes and political movements, but also
in the fields of science and technology, which had
a profound impact on what human beings have always perceived as “natural.” During the Reagan administration, some of the resources diverted from
social programs and government went to fund what
became known as “big science,” especially from its
critics. Astronomers and physicists lobbied for billions of dollars to support building large-scale particle accelerators, and NASA fueled an ongoing
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Wild geese flying in formation
campaign for its long-projected space station. Although both these projects had their funding severely cut by the end of the decade, neither was as
controversial as Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” as it was dubiously termed.
The effort’s aim was to construct an impenetrable
“space shield” to protect the United States from a
nuclear attack, but the sheer mathematics of stopping thousands of enemy missiles simultaneously,
coupled with an estimated one-trillion-dollar price
tag, grounded the project before it got too far off
the ground. Two other wake-up calls for big science—tragic, in these cases—came in 1986 with
the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle,
which killed all on board, and the meltdown at the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union,
which claimed the lives of at least 8,000 people.
Although technological advances and defeats
during the 1980s provoked loud opinions on both
sides of the issues, perhaps the most controversial
scientific “achievements” were made in the area of
biological manipulation, which gave mankind the
ability to alter nature at its very core. The discovery in the 1970s of how to recombine genetic material into new life forms spurred research scientists at universities and corporations in the 1980s
to produce new genetic codes and to begin to map
the three billion nucleotides that make up human
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DNA. Proponents of biological engineering touted
the possibilities of developing stronger, longerlasting food sources, including not only fruits and
vegetables, but also grains, beef, pork, and chicken.
They dreamt of curing deadly diseases once and for
all, and of creating life forms that could be used in
special cases, such as lab animals genetically coded
for cancer in order to help scientists understand the
disease better.
Opponents, however, viewed those same possibilities as dangerous and unethical, if not immoral. They pointed to the disasters in technology
that occurred in the 1980s and wondered if the same
tragedies might not happen in biology. What if
modified produce and meats became toxic and
greatly depleted the food supply? What if a genetically engineered virus escaped the boundaries of
the lab and introduced an incurable plague into the
general population? What if the godlike power to
alter human genes fell into the wrong hands—the
hands of someone who wanted to destroy certain
races and strengthen others? These questions may
at first sound as though they have been lifted from
the pages of a science fiction thriller, but biological manipulation is now a fact of life; therefore,
many feel that questioning how far humankind is
willing to go in this volatile direction should be
taken just as seriously.
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Fears about physical calamities are not the only
basis for opponents to speak out against genetic engineering. Many also fear, and detest, the idea of
altering nature to suit human desire. Perhaps they
fear, as well, a future in which a poet would not be
able to write of lonely individuals finding their
place “in the family of things.” The family, after
all, may someday be unrecognizable due to modern changes.
Critical Overview
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the
critical reception of Oliver’s work is that she has
been both commended and denounced for the same
things—her simple, clear language and her predominant use of nature as a subject. Some critics
find her treatment of the natural world not necessarily provocative, but intellectually stimulating all
the same. Writing for the Kentucky Review, Robin
Riley Fast says that
A strong sense of place, and of identity in relation to
it, is central to [Oliver’s] poetry. Her poems are
firmly located in the places where she has lived or
traveled . . . ; her moments of transcendence arise organically from the realities of swamp, pond, woods
and shore.
Other critics appreciate Oliver’s emphasis on
nature, too, but also recognize that there are those
who do not. In Papers on Language and Literature, Vicki Graham writes that
Oliver’s celebration of dissolution into the natural
world troubles some critics: her poems flirt dangerously with romantic assumptions about the close association of women with nature that many theorists
claim put the woman writer at risk.
For centuries, romantic nature poetry has been
considered the domain of male poets, and even
feminists have tended to shun Oliver’s work, believing that a strong female voice gets lost in praise
for nature.
The biggest complaint about the language in
Oliver’s poetry is that it is too “plain” and describes
conventional imagery instead of unusual takes on
nature. The poet, however, finds no need to manipulate or spruce up what already speaks for itself
in terms of beauty, elegance, and power. More often than not, critics who have made negative comments about her poetry end up admitting that her
lyrical style is still captivating, and that she has
managed to deal with commonplace subjects without lapsing into sentimentality. The number of
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awards her poetry has received is certainly evidence of her power as a poet, despite mixed critical response.
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill questions the necessity of advocating profane self-indulgence in an otherwise
serene, benevolent poem of natural beauty and human kindness.
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is a difficult poem to
like and an even more difficult poem to dislike. Its
initial ambiguity is cleared up all too soon, and the
apparent message leaves some readers unsettled:
you do not have to be a good human being. Instead,
you can opt for whatever physical pleasure you desire and not have to worry about feeling guilty nor
have a need to repent. Once this sentiment is out
of the way in the first five lines, however, the remainder of the poem expresses a kind gesture from
the poet to the reader—an invitation to share his or
her loneliness and despairing thoughts and to come
to understand that there is a place in nature’s family for everyone. Even the imagery shifts from a
philosophical, allusion-based metaphor in the first
few lines to a more concrete, direct description
throughout the rest of the work.
It seems, then, that “Wild Geese” is really two
poems in one. The first suggests hedonism and the
pursuit of pleasure as a remedy for human depression and loneliness. The other recommends paying
attention to the beauty of nature and to using your
imagination to see how you really do fit into “the
family of things.” Simply because the latter theme
is allowed more space in the poem, one may think
it is the work’s “true” message, but the very
provocative idea that “You do not have to be good”
cannot be ignored. If the latter theme is the real
point here, the poem would have echoed it much
more strongly without the first five lines.
The largest concern a doubtful reader may
have is this: why it was necessary for Oliver to include the notion about not being good, going so far
as to link “good” to biblical references regarding
Jesus and, perhaps, Moses and the Israelites. It’s a
good question. First, one can probably dispel any
idea that the poet is completely anti-religion and
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There is something
more than conversational,
in fact something deeply
personal, about two people
speaking intimately of their
own despair, and that is
the relationship between
poet and reader that Oliver
desires.”
advocates reckless, pleasure-seeking behavior in
place of traditional values set forth in the doctrines
of good versus evil. Nothing else in the poem, or
in any of Oliver’s other known works, supports
such a claim. In fact, many of her poems point to
a concern for immortality and thankfulness for the
natural wonders and loved ones she has encountered as a mortal being. Atheism and evilness aside,
then, what is the motive behind saying, “You do
not have to be good” and that “You only have to
let the soft animal of your body / love what it
loves”? Perhaps by addressing an intangible, philosophical ideal—goodness—and handily casting it
aside at the outset of the poem, Oliver is better able
to highlight the remarkableness of the tangible—
prairies, trees, mountains, rivers, and wild geese.
Or perhaps she recognizes that human beings, especially lonely or troubled ones, are more apt to
grasp the beauty of things they can see and touch
than some intellectual concept. Yet, this poem, like
so many of Oliver’s, is based on human intellect
and the connection between the human mind and
the natural world. Given that, one can only assume
that these two possible answers are pure speculation, at best. Unfortunately, this means that the
question regarding the purpose of including the first
five lines remains unanswered.
Telling people they “do not have to walk on
[their] knees / for a hundred miles through the
desert, repenting” seems to fly in the face of traditional morality. Most world religions teach followers that humility and worship are not just looked
upon favorably by a supreme being, but are required of the truly faithful. That is why the selfserving, possibly heretical lines that open “Wild
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Geese” are so disturbing to many readers. How,
then, does one account for the fact that this poem
is one of Oliver’s most popular? The answer to that
probably lies in the sentiment she expresses in the
rest of the poem.
By far, the dominant force of “Wild Geese” is
the speaker’s—or the poet’s—benevolent attitude
toward the reader, offering to listen to his or her
troubles and suggesting a heartwarming solution.
The immediacy of the poet’s words is aided by her
addressing “you” directly, a style that many readers find appealing. There is something more than
conversational, in fact something deeply personal,
about two people speaking intimately of their own
despair, and that is the relationship between poet
and reader that Oliver desires. To use a popular
phrase, she feels your pain. More importantly, she
wants to help the reader get rid of it.
So far, the discussion here has centered on the
psychological, philosophical, and intellectual concerns of the poem—all very intangible. Yet Oliver
is known for creating nature poems, works full of
descriptions of things one can see, hear, and touch,
and she stays true to her reputation in “Wild
Geese,” using the natural world as a vehicle to explain her solution to despair and loneliness. By portraying “the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain,”
the prairies, “deep trees,” mountains, and rivers as
lovely, carefree entities, she offers, metaphorically,
a picture of how the reader’s own life could look.
Assuring “you” that “the world goes on” and that
the wild geese “are heading home again” provides
the reader with a model to imitate, as well as a reason to open “your imagination” to the world that
“offers itself” and “calls to you like the wild geese.”
This is what makes Oliver’s poem so attractive. She
uses simple language and soft descriptions to drive
home a powerful point: the reader, too, has a place
“in the family of things”—a thought that sounds
like it comes from the mouth of a homey grandmother.
It is the friendly, inviting tone and message in
the middle and end of this poem that makes the
reader forget—or, perhaps, forgive—the beginning. A casual, light reading of “Wild Geese” probably elicits kind appreciation and brief pondering
on the part of the reader, and little more. In the
world of poetry, that is enough to make a work popular. But one who lingers on Oliver’s poem a little
longer or one who studies it carefully, line by line,
may be nagged by the apparent profanity of its
opening. By themselves, the first five lines are not
disturbing, and if they opened a poem that carried
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through the same sentiment to its end, they still
would not be disturbing. But in “Wild Geese,” they
seem strange and out of place. The bold notion that
“You do not have to be good” is misleading when
followed by such strong examples of the speaker
being just that—good. Still, the positives in this
poem outnumber the negatives based on line count
alone. For each reason not to like it, there are two
or three to like it quite a bit.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Wild Geese,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
G e e s e
As we allow ‘the soft
animal’ of our bodies to
emerge and discover our
animal essence, in a
revelatory moment, we can
become wild as the geese.”
Wendy Perkins
Perkins teaches American and British literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines
Oliver’s call for a sympathetic union between the
self and nature.
Commenting on Mary Oliver’s body of work, Janet
McNew writes in an article for Contemporary Literature, “at its most intense, her poetry aims to peer
beneath the constructions of culture and reason that
burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions” of the natural
world. In “Wild Geese,” Oliver explores how we
have been oppressed by these “constructions of culture” and offers us fruitful, fresh alternatives. In her
clear and eloquent voice, she privileges the power
of the imagination to help us break free from the
confines of society and so be able to reconnect with
our more elemental, natural selves.
The poem begins with the speaker urging an
unnamed listener to separate him or herself from
social notions of “goodness.” She does not identify
the gender of the speaker or the listener in an attempt to include all in the experience of the poem.
By refusing to define oneself according to accepted
standards, one would therefore not have to accept
punishment for disregarding those standards. One
would not need to repent by walking on one’s knees
“for a hundred miles through the desert.’’
The speaker suggests that a separation from the
social be followed with a union with nature, where
one could recover one’s elemental connection with
natural creatures. Vicki Graham, in her
article,“‘Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver
and the Poetics of Becoming Other,” argues,
“rooted in the binary oppositions that structure
Western thinking, Oliver can never fully escape the
teaching of her culture that . . . identity depends on
keeping intact the boundaries between self and others.” Colin Lowndes in a review of Oliver’s work
for the Toronto Globe & Mail seems to contradict
Graham when he insists that Oliver is “a poet of
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worked-for reconciliations” who focuses on the
“points at which opposing forces meet.” In “Wild
Geese,” Oliver accommodates both of these points
of view in her establishment of an ironic juxtaposition of individual and collective, insisting that we
first need to establish our independence from cultural constructions of value before we can open ourselves to more natural unions. We could reestablish this attachment by allowing “the soft animal”
of our bodies to “love what it loves” without any
direction from artificial sources. Thus, as a strong
sense of place shifts from the social to the natural
world, so too does identity in relation to place.
The process of becoming another, more primitive self depends on first establishing a direct association with the natural world. We must love
through our bodies not our minds to establish the
connection we need to effect a change in ourselves.
By seeing and touching, we identify with and therefore become a part of nature.
This union with nature would be enhanced by
a connection with the community of mankind as
articulated through the speaker’s suggestion that
“despair” should be expressed and shared. As the
speaker and listener communicate their suffering to
each other, they align themselves with the ebb and
flow of nature. The “world goes on” around them;
the sun and the “clear pebbles of the rain” move
“across the landscapes.”
Oliver insists that we begin to pay attention to
what nature can offer us as she offers her insight
through observations of a delightful world. As she
focuses on the luminous qualities of nature, “the
clear pebbles of the rain” and the “harsh and exciting” wild geese, she shows us how to take note
of and savor the entirety of an experience with the
natural world. She illustrates the extent of the potential for a harmonious communion with nature in
her delineation of the landscapes that stretch from
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Published in 1992, Oliver’s New and Selected
Poems is a great overview of three decades of
the poet’s work. This collection received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992.
• In 2000, Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E.
Roth published a helpful, interesting guide for
anyone who enjoys being close to nature and
wants to record the experience. Keeping a Nature Journal helps readers create ongoing journals for all seasons, describes simple ways to
capture the natural world in words and pictures,
and inspires readers to make “nature journaling”
a part of daily life.
• Any reader interested in animal biology and animal habitats will enjoy Bruce Batt’s Snow
Geese: Grandeur and Calamity on an Arctic
Landscape (1998). Batt describes the natural
history of the snow goose, its migratory paths
and stopovers, and how the growing population
of these birds is causing long-term degradation
on their Arctic breeding grounds. He offers a revealing explanation of how this population
growth affects not only snow geese but a number of other Arctic-dwelling animals as well.
• A contemporary of Mary Oliver, poet Maxine
Kumin often writes of nature and of her home
life in the backcountry of Vermont. Like Oliver,
she also writes prose, and in her memoir Always
Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (2000),
Kumin offers an intriguing look at modern country life, her experiences as both a mother and an
artist, and her eighteen-year friendship with poet
Anne Sexton.
prairie to forest to mountain to river. The potential
depth of the communion is expressed by the reference to the landscape of “deep trees.” In the twelfth
line, Oliver reinforces our connection to nature by
imagining wild geese “heading home again.” She
suggests that if we reclaim our original bond with
nature, we can fly like the wild geese, free of so-
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cial constrictions “in the clean blue air.” Nature becomes a mirror through which we can discover a
new, truer perspective of ourselves.
The redemptive power of nature becomes evident in the next line when the speaker reassures
the listener that the loneliness caused by the limits
of the social world can be alleviated and transcended through an imaginative connection with
the natural world. By opening ourselves to natural
experience, by responding to the “harsh and exciting” calls of the universe, we, like the wild geese,
can maintain our identity, our “place,” yet at the
same time understand our inherent connection with
the “family of things.” This fusion with nature
reestablishes our core self, which becomes more
open and encompassing than our social selves. As
we allow “the soft animal” of our bodies to emerge
and discover our animal essence, in a revelatory
moment, we can become wild as the geese. As a
result of this transcendence, we become open to the
possibility of experiencing a profound satisfaction
and joy.
Marilyn Chancler McEntyre, in her assessment
of the poem in the Santa Barbara Review writes
that through the poem, Oliver invites us to “enter
into the gentle, humble, wild, free, authoritative
work of the imagination,” and shows us how to
“learn the language of the inarticulate natural world
and hear its message, reiterated in every sentient
thing,” a message telling us “to be is the holiest
thing.” Oliver avoids sentimentality in this transcendent moment by maintaining her clear vision
of this “harsh and exciting” world.
Oliver structures the poem into three movements employing present tense to provide readers
with a more dynamic experience. First, she directs
us to explore our present situations, specifically
how social constructions have restricted us and separated us from the natural world. Then, only when
we throw off cultural restraints can we begin to
come to a heightened awareness of nature and our
relation to it. This readiness to investigate ways to
redefine ourselves leads to an epiphany. As we envision ourselves in an individual and a collective
sense through an imaginative response to our
world, we reestablish our natural selves. We go beyond knowing into being. This process moves us
from guilt, despair, and loneliness to a sense of
completion and happiness. The speaker communicates with the readers by speaking in the second
person, which helps us break through the social
boundaries we have allowed to form around us,
separating us from nature, and establish a real connection with humanity and our world.
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Oliver’s poetic vision is expressed through
pleasing rhythms and a thoughtful, finely tuned
merging of statement and image. The construction
of short lines helps to reinforce the parallels she
makes between self and world. Her conversational
tone as she enumerates the abundance of nature and
the possibilities for our union with it reinforces the
sense of peace achieved by the end of the poem.
In her article in Women’s Review of Books,
Maxine Kumin writes that Oliver is an “indefatigable guide to the natural world . . . particularly to
its lesser-known aspects.” She admits that she trusts
whatever Oliver tells her “about moths and marsh
marigolds, fingerlings and egrets.” Kumin declares
that as Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky,
the thin membrane that separates human from what
we loosely call animal,” she creates poems that
move us “deeply.” One such poem is “Wild Geese,”
which calls us simply and eloquently to a more intense and thus satisfying connection with our
world.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “Wild Geese,”
in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Mary Potter
Potter is a writer of fiction and screenplays.
In this essay, Potter shows how the interplay of elements of incantation reveals the theme of Oliver’s
poem.
Chanting, casting a spell, prophesizing the future—
incantation in poetry and music uses rhythm and
repetition to evoke emotion rather than to appeal
to one’s sense of humor or reason. In Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, for example, witches recite their recipe
in an incantation, summoning forth the spirits. Incantation has its literary roots in the Bible, popular examples are found in the Psalms, when the Hebrew poets call out to God, lamenting their fortune
or praising his goodness.
An example of incantation in American poetry
lies in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which
twentieth-century poet Allen Ginsberg also played
upon in “Howl.” These poems exhibit the long,
rolling lines set off by shorter lines that are characteristic of incantation. The meter of these lines is
not regular like iambic pentameter; rhyme is not
regular either. Instead, Whitman and Ginsberg use
repeated words and phrases and parallel structure
(similar grammar) in their poems to evoke the
American spirit of their times.
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Once lonely, Oliver’s
reader finds not only a
place with the geese in the
order of the universe but a
unique place, too, because,
unlike the geese, the reader
has an imagination.”
Whitman’s incantation-like repetition is evident in the first few lines of “Song of Myself”:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of
summer grass.
“Loafe” is repeated, and the second line of
“Song of Myself” is long, unfurling easily. Both
lines are parallel, beginning with “I.”
Ginsberg employs a similar tactic in the opening lines of “Howl”:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
Ginsberg’s incantatory lines run even longer
than Whitman’s. Other ready examples of incantation are the lines spoken by the chorus in Greek
drama, Gregorian chant, or the mantras of yogis.
Like the above, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”
uses repetition and parallel structure in an incantation to the human spirit. Giving her fellow human
beings hope when they feel hopeless, she addresses
her readers with a poetic meditation.
“Wild Geese” falls into three sections, the first
set off by the repetition of “You” three times in the
first five lines; the second, by “Meanwhile” three
times in the next seven lines. The third section of
five lines then states the theme of the poem.
In the first section, Oliver addresses the reader
directly, using “you” to open. She alludes to religions that preach goodness; specifically, JudeoChristian practices of repentance, of Jesus Christ
fasting and praying for forty days in the desert. The
first two lines are similar in their sentence struc-
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ture, beginning with “You do not have to.” This
sets up the third line, for if you do not have to “be
good” or “walk on your knees in the desert,” what
do you have to do? Oliver says in a lush incantatory line, “You only have to let the soft animal of
your body love what it loves.”
But she follows this with a shift: “Tell me
about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” This
shorter line achieves its emphasis for a couple of
reasons. She places “yours,” referring to the reader,
in the middle, and then refers to herself, “I will tell
you mine.” Using a kind of parallelism called antithesis, the two clauses mirror each other and draw
Oliver into the dialogue she is having with her
reader. Although not marked as a stanza, the first
five lines fall together, using repetition, the movement of three lines that roll with greater speed toward the fourth line, and the fifth antithetical line
that both summarizes the first four and serves as a
transition to the next section.
The second section also uses repetition, as
“Meanwhile” begins three of its seven lines, three
of Oliver’s thoughts on despair. Thus, while “you”
and “I” are talking about despair, Oliver writes,
“the world goes on,” her use of a cliché expressing the emotion of despair. The second instance of
“Meanwhile” begins what is a long sentence broken into four lines. The word itself points not only
to the movement of time, but in Oliver’s poem,
space, too, as lines 6–12 take the reader through a
panorama of the world: “the clear pebbles of the
rain / are moving across the landscapes.” Then
“Meanwhile” begins the line that introduces the
central image of the poem, the wild geese, who are
“heading home again,” as the reader watches,
alone, still despairing. These lines, full of movement, set the stage for the statement of the poem’s
theme that comes at the beginning of the third and
final section.
Oliver stops her reader in lines 13 and 14 with
a clear statement: “Whoever you are, no matter how
lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination.” This is the poet’s answer for loneliness and
despair: the imagination. For how can people be
lonely if they have the world to observe and the
imagination to do their dreaming? Part of being human is feeling lonely from time to time, yet another
aspect of human nature is being able to use the
imagination to reach beyond oneself.
So the imagination offers hope. Oliver, through
her imagination and her poetry, gives the reader a
picture of the world and the beauty of nature.
Through two curious juxtapositions, the placement
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of “clear” next to “pebbles” and “deep” next to
“trees,” the wonder of the natural world is evoked.
Perceived imaginatively, rain can look like clear
pebbles, and trees can both have deep-reaching
roots and be deep green in color. Only the human
imagination can comprehend that the world calls
“like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” that, yes,
“over and over” existence is “harsh and exciting”;
and over and over, one can find his “place in the
family of things.” But imagery is not the only creation of the imagination, for the body feels rhythm,
moves the body, and suddenly Oliver uses it to drive
her theme. “Harsh and exciting” establishes a regular rhythm for the first time in the poem. It continues in “over and over announcing your place”
and concludes the poet’s statement of theme with
“in the family of things.” The final sentence, made
up of the final five lines, brings the reader “home”
again, too, through its rhythm and the central image of the geese. Once lonely, Oliver’s reader finds
not only a place with the geese in the order of the
universe but a unique place, too, because, unlike the
geese, the reader has an imagination.
With “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver both evokes
hope for a hopeless reader and comforts the lonely
by placing him among his fellow creatures in the
natural world. Like a magician casting a spell, or
someone praying aloud, the poet calls to readers of
her poem to embrace not institutionalized religion
but a different kind of spirituality, the prize of nature, the human imagination. Not through repentance but through love, not through a poem with
meter and rhyme, but through the repetition and
rhythms of incantation, Mary Oliver summons
forth her own gods.
Source: Mary Potter, Critical Essay on “Wild Geese,” in
Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sources
Fast, Robin Riley, “The Native American Presence in Mary
Oliver’s Poetry,” in Kentucky Review, Vol. 12, Nos. 1–2,
Autumn 1993, pp. 59, 65–66.
Ginsberg, Allen, “Howl,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition, edited by Alexander W. Allison, et al., W.
W. Norton & Company, 1983, pp. 1273–77.
Graham, Vicki, “‘Into the Body of Another’: Mary Oliver
and the Poetics of Becoming Other,” in Papers on Language
and Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4, Fall 1994, pp. 352–53,
366–68.
Haxton, Brooks, “Incantation,” in The Craft of Poetry, seminar at Sarah Lawrence College, 1992.
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Kumin, Maxine, “Intimations of Mortality,” in Women’s Review of Books, Vol.10, No. 7, April 1993, p. 19.
shows how uniquely it can be presented by different
poets.
Lowndes, Colin, Review of Dream Work, in Globe and
Mail, August 23, 1986.
Oliver, Mary, The Leaf and the Cloud, Da Capo Press, 2000.
Oliver’s most recent publication, this book-length
poem continues on the theme of nature, and contains
some of the poet’s most striking imagery yet. For example, she depicts vegetables growing in a garden
with: “The green pea / climbs the stake / on her sugary muscles,” and “The rosy comma of the radish /
fattens in the soil.”
McEntyre, Marilyn Chancler, “A Reading of Mary Oliver,”
in Santa Barbara Review, Fall–Winter 1994.
McNew, Janet, “Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 30, No.
1, Spring 1989, pp. 60–75.
Oliver, Mary, Dream Work, The Atlantic Monthly Press,
1986.
—, Winter Hours, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999,
p. 24.
Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself,” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by James E. Miller
Jr., Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959, pp. 25–68.
Further Reading
Daniel, John, ed., Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World,
University of Georgia Press, 1998.
This recent collection of poems by over a hundred
nature poets provides a thorough look at the treatment of the natural world in verse. Although the subject is one of the most common in poetry, this book
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—, A Poetry Handbook, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994
Oliver has authored two books on the “how to” of
poetry writing, and both are wonderfully written and
helpful, even for those who do not care much for the
subject. In this book, she deals with both traditional
and contemporary verse; discusses tone, voice, and
imagery; and gives a bit of the history of both American and English poetry.
—, Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and
Reading Metrical Verse, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
This is Oliver’s second “how to” book, but it deals
only with metrical verse, as opposed to free verse. In
it, she covers everything from breath and line length
to rhyme and “image-making.” Anything but a dry
treatise on poetry writing, the book includes chapters
titled “Release of Energy along the Lines,” “Mutes
and Other Sounds,” and “The Ohs and the Ahs,” to
name a few.
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Glossary of Literary Terms
A
Abstract: Used as a noun, the term refers to a short
summary or outline of a longer work. As an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract
refers to words or phrases that name things not
knowable through the five senses.
Accent: The emphasis or stress placed on a syllable in poetry. Traditional poetry commonly uses
patterns of accented and unaccented syllables
(known as feet) that create distinct rhythms. Much
modern poetry uses less formal arrangements that
create a sense of freedom and spontaneity.
Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of
the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement
believed that art should not be mixed with social,
political, or moral teaching. The statement “art for
art’s sake” is a good summary of aestheticism. The
movement had its roots in France, but it gained
widespread importance in England in the last half
of the nineteenth century, where it helped change
the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in
literature.
Affective Fallacy: An error in judging the merits
or faults of a work of literature. The “error” results
from stressing the importance of the work’s effect
upon the reader—that is, how it makes a reader
“feel” emotionally, what it does as a literary
work—instead of stressing its inner qualities as a
created object, or what it “is.”
Age of Johnson: The period in English literature
between 1750 and 1798, named after the most
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prominent literary figure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for
their emphasis on “sensibility,” or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the
rational works of the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the Romantic period.
Age of Reason: See Neoclassicism
Age of Sensibility: See Age of Johnson
Agrarians: A group of Southern American writers
of the 1930s and 1940s who fostered an economic
and cultural program for the South based on agriculture, in opposition to the industrial society of
the North. The term can refer to any group that
promotes the value of farm life and agricultural
society.
Alexandrine Meter: See Meter
Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used
to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is
typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious
lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes.
Alliteration: A poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated.
Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more
easily understood.
Amerind Literature: The writing and oral traditions of Native Americans. Native American liter-
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ature was originally passed on by word of mouth,
so it consisted largely of stories and events that
were easily memorized. Amerind prose is often
rhythmic like poetry because it was recited to the
beat of a ceremonial drum.
Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities
to something familiar, or to prove one point based
on the acceptedness of another. Similes and
metaphors are types of analogies.
Anapest: See Foot
Angry Young Men: A group of British writers of
the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work
is an antihero who rebels against a corrupt social
order and strives for personal integrity.
Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals
or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word
for “human form.”
Antimasque: See Masque
Antithesis: The antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as
a figure of speech results in two statements that
show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion
of the statement that is defined as the “antithesis”;
the first portion is the “thesis.”
Apocrypha: Writings tentatively attributed to an
author but not proven or universally accepted to be
their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the “sacred
canon.”
Apollonian and Dionysian: The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy. The
Apollonian impulse is named after Apollo, the
Greek god of light and beauty and the symbol of
intellectual order. The Dionysian impulse is named
after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the symbol of the unrestrained forces of nature. The Apollonian impulse is to create a rational, harmonious
world, while the Dionysian is to express the irrational forces of personality.
Apostrophe: A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a
nonexistent or absent person.
Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used
to describe an original pattern or model from which
all other things of the same kind are made. This
term was introduced to literary criticism from the
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psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung’s theory that behind every person’s “unconscious,” or
repressed memories of the past, lies the “collective
unconscious” of the human race: memories of the
countless typical experiences of our ancestors.
These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the
reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive,
even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images
that grow out of the “collective unconscious.” They
appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as
stereotyped characters.
Argument: The argument of a work is the author’s
subject matter or principal idea.
Art for Art’s Sake: See Aestheticism
Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds
in poetry.
Audience: The people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain
audience in mind, for example, children, members
of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a
professional field. The term “audience” also applies
to the people who gather to see or hear any
performance, including plays, poetry readings,
speeches, and concerts.
Automatic Writing: Writing carried out without a
preconceived plan in an effort to capture every random thought. Authors who engage in automatic
writing typically do not revise their work, preferring instead to preserve the revealed truth and
beauty of spontaneous expression.
Avant-garde: A French term meaning “vanguard.”
It is used in literary criticism to describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature
in favor of innovations in style or content.
B
Ballad: A short poem that tells a simple story and
has a repeated refrain. Ballads were originally intended to be sung. Early ballads, known as folk ballads, were passed down through generations, so
their authors are often unknown. Later ballads composed by known authors are called literary ballads.
Baroque: A term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style
or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term
“Baroque Age” designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth
century and ending about one hundred years later.
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Works of this period often mirror the qualities of
works more generally associated with the label
“baroque” and sometimes feature elaborate conceits.
Baroque Age: See Baroque
Baroque Period: See Baroque
Beat Generation: See Beat Movement
Beat Movement: A period featuring a group of
American poets and novelists of the 1950s and
1960s—including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who rejected established
social and literary values. Using such techniques
as stream-of-consciousness writing and jazzinfluenced free verse and focusing on unusual or
abnormal states of mind—generated by religious
ecstasy or the use of drugs—the Beat writers aimed
to create works that were unconventional in both
form and subject matter.
Beat Poets: See Beat Movement
Beats, The: See Beat Movement
Belles-lettres: A French term meaning “fine letters” or “beautiful writing.” It is often used as a
synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the
meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature.
Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic
and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the
first major African American artistic movement
since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to
produce works of art that would be meaningful to
the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics
included one of its founders, poet and playwright
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones;
poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don
L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and
dramatist Ed Bullins.
Black Arts Movement: See Black Aesthetic Movement
Black Comedy: See Black Humor
Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to
laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world.
Black Mountain School: Black Mountain College
and three of its instructors—Robert Creeley, Robert
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Duncan, and Charles Olson—were all influential in
projective verse. Today poets working in projective verse are referred to as members of the Black
Mountain school.
Blank Verse: Loosely, any unrhymed poetry, but
more generally, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse
(composed of lines of five two-syllable feet with
the first syllable accented, the second unaccented).
Blank verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its flexibility and its graceful, dignified tone.
Bloomsbury Group: A group of English writers,
artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic
and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a
district of London, from around 1907 to the early
1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform
philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an
aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater
social tolerance.
Bon Mot: A French term meaning “good word.” A
bon mot is a witty remark or clever observation.
Breath Verse: See Projective Verse
Burlesque: Any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by
treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness
or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. The
word “burlesque” may also be used as an adjective,
as in “burlesque show,” to mean “striptease act.”
C
Cadence: The natural rhythm of language caused
by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern poetry—notably free verse—
deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex
rhythmic effects.
Caesura: A pause in a line of poetry, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to
a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line
but is sometimes shifted to create special meanings
or rhythmic effects.
Canzone: A short Italian or Provencal lyric poem,
commonly about love and often set to music. The
canzone has no set form but typically contains five
or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of
eleven syllables each. A shorter, five- to ten-line
“envoy,” or concluding stanza, completes the
poem.
Carpe Diem: A Latin term meaning “seize the
day.” This is a traditional theme of poetry, especially lyrics. A carpe diem poem advises the reader
or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment.
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Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted
emotions—specifically fear and pity—brought
about by exposure to art. The term was first used
by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics
to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators.
Celtic Renaissance: A period of Irish literary and
cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a
romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The
most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance
typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually
in reaction against the reality of contemporary
problems.
Celtic Twilight: See Celtic Renaissance
Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are
numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted
ones. In the techniques of anthropomorphism and
personification, animals—and even places or
things—can assume aspects of character. “Characterization” is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art.
This may be done in a variety of ways, including
(1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech,
thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The
term “character” also refers to a form originated by
the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person
who prominently displays a specific attribute or
quality, such as miserliness or ambition.
Characterization: See Character
Classical: In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek
or Roman literature. The term may also be used to
describe a literary work of recognized importance
(a “classic”) from any time period or literature that
exhibits the traits of classicism.
Classicism: A term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and
art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical
organization, and respect for tradition.
Colloquialism: A word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation
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but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang.
Complaint: A lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about
his or her condition. Typically, the speaker’s sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some
complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such
as poverty or fate.
Conceit: A clever and fanciful metaphor, usually
expressed through elaborate and extended comparison, that presents a striking parallel between two
seemingly dissimilar things—for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object
like a garden or the sun. The conceit was a popular device throughout the Elizabethan Age and
Baroque Age and was the principal technique of
the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to
the best-known definition of conceit as an arrogant
attitude or behavior.
Concrete: Concrete is the opposite of abstract, and
refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object
or concept with the senses.
Concrete Poetry: Poetry in which visual elements
play a large part in the poetic effect. Punctuation
marks, letters, or words are arranged on a page to
form a visual design: a cross, for example, or a
bumblebee.
Confessional Poetry: A form of poetry in which
the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes
shocking information about himself or herself.
Connotation: The impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning. Connotations may be
universally understood or may be significant only
to a certain group.
Consonance: Consonance occurs in poetry when
words appearing at the ends of two or more verses
have similar final consonant sounds but have final
vowel sounds that differ, as with “stuff” and “off.”
Convention: Any widely accepted literary device,
style, or form.
Corrido: A Mexican ballad.
Couplet: Two lines of poetry with the same rhyme
and meter, often expressing a complete and selfcontained thought.
Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of
literary works, usually based on a specific method
or set of principles. An important part of literary
studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism
has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and
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“schools,” sometimes producing conflicting, even
contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel
have been the subject of much criticism over the
centuries.
D
Dactyl: See Foot
Dadaism: A protest movement in art and literature
founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the
movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting
against numerous forms of social convention. The
Dadaists presented works marked by calculated
madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed
total freedom of expression, commonly through
primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often
senseless, poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism.
Decadent: See Decadents
Decadents: The followers of a nineteenth-century
literary movement that had its beginnings in French
aestheticism. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for
novelty and sensation—the “new thrill”; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is
closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art’s
Sake. The term “decadence” is sometimes used to
denote a decline in the quality of art or literature
following a period of greatness.
Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by
multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work.
Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning
of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the
author intended.
Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion
through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise.
Denotation: The definition of a word, apart from
the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader.
Diction: The selection and arrangement of words
in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types of diction: “formal,” used in scholarly or
lofty writing; “informal,” used in relaxed but educated conversation; “colloquial,” used in everyday
speech; and “slang,” containing newly coined words
and other terms not accepted in formal usage.
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Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements
are often found in artistically pleasing works, the
term “didactic” usually refers to literature in which
the message is more important than the form. The
term may also be used to criticize a work that the
critic finds “overly didactic,” that is, heavy-handed
in its delivery of a lesson.
Dimeter: See Meter
Dionysian: See Apollonian and Dionysian
Discordia concours: A Latin phrase meaning “discord in harmony.” The term was coined by the
eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson
to describe “a combination of dissimilar images or
discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Johnson created the expression by reversing a phrase by the Latin poet Horace.
Dissonance: A combination of harsh or jarring
sounds, especially in poetry. Although such combinations may be accidental, poets sometimes intentionally make them to achieve particular effects.
Dissonance is also sometimes used to refer to close
but not identical rhymes. When this is the case, the
word functions as a synonym for consonance.
Double Entendre: A corruption of a French phrase
meaning “double meaning.” The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is
risque or improper.
Draft: Any preliminary version of a written work.
An author may write dozens of drafts which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write
only one, with few or no revisions.
Dramatic Monologue: See Monologue
Dramatic Poetry: Any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as dialogue, conflict, or characterization, but excluding works that are intended
for stage presentation.
Dream Allegory: See Dream Vision
Dream Vision: A literary convention, chiefly of
the Middle Ages. In a dream vision a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and
religious lessons.
E
Eclogue: In classical literature, a poem featuring
rural themes and structured as a dialogue among
shepherds. Eclogues often took specific poetic
forms, such as elegies or love poems. Some were
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written as the soliloquy of a shepherd. In later centuries, “eclogue” came to refer to any poem that
was in the pastoral tradition or that had a dialogue
or monologue structure.
Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII
of England (1901–1910). Writers of the Edwardian
Age typically displayed a strong reaction against
the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian
Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses
strong doubts about the soundness of conventional
values.
Edwardian Age: See Edwardian
Electra Complex: A daughter’s amorous obsession with her father.
Elegy: A lyric poem that laments the death of a
person or the eventual death of all people. In a conventional elegy, set in a classical world, the poet
and subject are spoken of as shepherds. In modern
criticism, the word elegy is often used to refer to a
poem that is melancholy or mournfully contemplative.
Elizabethan Age: A period of great economic
growth, religious controversy, and nationalism
closely associated with the reign of Elizabeth I of
England (1558–1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general renaissance—that is,
the flowering of arts and literature—that took place
in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth
centuries. The era is considered the golden age of
English literature. The most important dramas in
English and a great deal of lyric poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time.
Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including
emotional and physical feelings, with someone or
something other than oneself. Empathy is often
used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character.
English Sonnet: See Sonnet
Enjambment: The running over of the sense and
structure of a line of verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet.
Enlightenment, The: An eighteenth-century
philosophical movement. It began in France but had
a wide impact throughout Europe and America.
Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and
believed that both the individual and society could
achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this
essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority.
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Epic: A long narrative poem about the adventures
of a hero of great historic or legendary importance.
The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons.
Epics are typically written in a classical style of
grand simplicity with elaborate metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a
hero’s adventures.
Epic Simile: See Homeric Simile
Epigram: A saying that makes the speaker’s point
quickly and concisely.
Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a
literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue
is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an
actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the
audience.
Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired
by a seemingly trivial incident.
Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb or tombstone,
or a verse written on the occasion of a person’s
death. Epitaphs may be serious or humorous.
Epithalamion: A song or poem written to honor
and commemorate a marriage ceremony.
Epithalamium: See Epithalamion
Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or
abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone
or something.
Erziehungsroman: See Bildungsroman
Essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel
de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of
brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. An essay can
also be a long, systematic discourse.
Existentialism: A predominantly twentiethcentury philosophy concerned with the nature and
perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and
Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of
suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because
there are no fixed values, individuals can create
their own characters—indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated
with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian
existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only
in God may people find freedom from life’s an-
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guish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or
described through empirical effort; that anguish is
a universal element of life; that individuals must
bear responsibility for their actions; and that there
is no common standard of behavior or perception
for religious and ethical matters.
Expatriates: See Expatriatism
Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another
country.
Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature
of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is
often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, the exposition is the
introductory material which presents the characters,
setting, and tone of the play.
Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century
school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way.
Extended Monologue: See Monologue
F
Feet: See Foot
Feminine Rhyme: See Rhyme
Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in
real life but their ultimate form and configuration
is a creation of the author.
Figurative Language: A technique in writing in
which the author temporarily interrupts the order,
construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of
one or more figures of speech such as hyperbole,
irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is
truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment.
Figures of Speech: Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special
meaning or effect. There are two major types of
figures of speech: rhetorical figures, which do not
make changes in the meaning of the words; and
tropes, which do.
Fin de siecle: A French term meaning “end of the
century.” The term is used to denote the last decade
of the nineteenth century, a transition period when
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writers and other artists abandoned old conventions
and looked for new techniques and objectives.
First Person: See Point of View
Folk Ballad: See Ballad
Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed
on by word of mouth in various forms—such as
legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by
W. J. Thoms in 1846.
Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including
legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events.
Foot: The smallest unit of rhythm in a line of poetry. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically
one accented syllable combined with one or two
unaccented syllables.
Form: The pattern or construction of a work which
identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other
genres.
Formalism: In literary criticism, the belief that literature should follow prescribed rules of construction, such as those that govern the sonnet form.
Fourteener Meter: See Meter
Free Verse: Poetry that lacks regular metrical and
rhyme patterns but that tries to capture the cadences
of everyday speech. The form allows a poet to exploit a variety of rhythmical effects within a single
poem.
Futurism: A flamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia
from 1908 through the 1920s. Futurist theater and
poetry abandoned traditional literary forms. In their
place, followers of the movement attempted to
achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre
imagery and deformed or newly invented words.
The Futurists were self-consciously modern artists
who attempted to incorporate the appearances and
sounds of modern life into their work.
G
Genre: A category of literary work. In critical theory, genre may refer to both the content of a given
work—tragedy, comedy, pastoral—and to its form,
such as poetry, novel, or drama.
Genteel Tradition: A term coined by critic George
Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the Genteel
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Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards.
Georgian Age: See Georgian Poets
Georgian Period: See Georgian Poets
Georgian Poets: A loose grouping of English poets during the years 1912–1922. The Georgians reacted against certain literary schools and practices,
especially Victorian wordiness, turn-of-the-century
aestheticism, and contemporary urban realism. In
their place, the Georgians embraced the nineteenthcentury poetic practices of William Wordsworth
and the other Lake Poets.
Georgic: A poem about farming and the farmer’s
way of life, named from Virgil’s Georgics.
Gilded Age: A period in American history during
the 1870s characterized by political corruption and
materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this
time.
Gothic: See Gothicism
Gothicism: In literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A gothic novel prominently features
elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses,
ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term “gothic novel” is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional
Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere
of terror or dread.
Graveyard School: A group of eighteenth-century
English poets who wrote long, picturesque meditations on death. Their works were designed to cause
the reader to ponder immortality.
Great Chain of Being: The belief that all things
and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God
at the top. This system of belief was popular in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Grotesque: In literary criticism, the subject matter
of a work or a style of expression characterized by
exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of
comic absurdity.
H
Haiku: The shortest form of Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The message of a haiku poem
usually centers on some aspect of spirituality and
provokes an emotional response in the reader.
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Half Rhyme: See Consonance
Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of
the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the
United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black
literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread
recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among
the major writers associated with this period are
Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen,
and Zora Neale Hurston.
Hellenism: Imitation of ancient Greek thought or
styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the
growth and development of the intellect. “Hellenism” is sometimes used to refer to the belief that
reason can be applied to examine all human experience.
Heptameter: See Meter
Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. Heroes and
heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example.
Heroic Couplet: A rhyming couplet written in
iambic pentameter (a verse with five iambic feet).
Heroic Line: The meter and length of a line of
verse in epic or heroic poetry. This varies by language and time period.
Heroine: See Hero/Heroine
Hexameter: See Meter
Historical Criticism: The study of a work based
on its impact on the world of the time period in
which it was written.
Hokku: See Haiku
Holocaust: See Holocaust Literature
Holocaust Literature: Literature influenced by or
written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such
literature includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as
well as fictional works and poetry.
Homeric Simile: An elaborate, detailed comparison written as a simile many lines in length.
Horatian Satire: See Satire
Humanism: A philosophy that places faith in the
dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature.
“Humanists” typically believe in the perfectibility
of human nature and view reason and education as
the means to that end.
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Humors: Mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person’s health and personality were determined by the balance of four
basic fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile,
and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would
cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive,
and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience,
anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive
black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness,
gluttony, and lack of motivation.
ics who believe in the concept of the intentional
fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they
may concede that an author’s statement of purpose
can be useful.
Humours: See Humors
Internal Rhyme: Rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse.
Hyperbole: In literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect.
I
Iamb: See Foot
Idiom: A word construction or verbal expression
closely associated with a given language.
Image: A concrete representation of an object or
sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the
object or experience itself. Images are either “literal” or “figurative.” Literal images are especially
concrete and involve little or no extension of the
obvious meaning of the words used to express them.
Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are
usually visual, but the term “image” can also refer
to the representation of any sensory experience.
Imagery: The array of images in a literary work.
Also, figurative language.
Imagism: An English and American poetry movement that flourished between 1908 and 1917. The
Imagists used precise, clearly presented images in
their works. They also used common, everyday
speech and aimed for conciseness, concrete imagery, and the creation of new rhythms.
In medias res: A Latin term meaning “in the middle of things.” It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various
flashback devices to reveal previous action.
Induction: The process of reaching a conclusion
by reasoning from specific premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a
work of literature, especially a play.
Intentional Fallacy: The belief that judgments of
a literary work based solely on an author’s stated
or implied intentions are false and misleading. Crit-
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Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in
which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way
that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The
interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and
unconscious level. Images are often used to represent sensations or emotions.
Irish Literary Renaissance: A late nineteenthand early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce
the influence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature.
Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language
in which the intended meaning is the opposite of
what is stated.
Italian Sonnet: See Sonnet
J
Jacobean Age: The period of the reign of James I
of England (1603–1625). The early literature of this
period reflected the worldview of the Elizabethan
Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily
grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age.
This was an important time for English drama and
poetry.
Jargon: Language that is used or understood only
by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical
language that is not understood by most people.
Journalism: Writing intended for publication in a
newspaper or magazine, or for broadcast on a radio or television program featuring news, sports,
entertainment, or other timely material.
K
Knickerbocker Group: A somewhat indistinct
group of New York writers of the first half of the
nineteenth century. Members of the group were
linked only by location and a common theme: New
York life.
Kunstlerroman: See Bildungsroman
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Lais: See Lay
Lake Poets: See Lake School
Lake School: These poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single “school”
of thought or literary practice, although their works
were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review.
Lay: A song or simple narrative poem. The form
originated in medieval France. Early French lais
were often based on the Celtic legends and other
tales sung by Breton minstrels—thus the name of
the “Breton lay.” In fourteenth-century England,
the term “lay” was used to describe short narratives
written in imitation of the Breton lays.
Leitmotiv: See Motif
Literal Language: An author uses literal language
when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools
of figurative language.
Literary Ballad: See Ballad
Literature: Literature is broadly defined as any
written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works.
Lost Generation: A term first used by Gertrude
Stein to describe the post-World War I generation
of American writers: men and women haunted by
a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by
the destructiveness of the war.
Lyric Poetry: A poem expressing the subjective
feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such
poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry
in the twentieth century may be classified as lyrical.
M
Mannerism: Exaggerated, artificial adherence to a
literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of
the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that
was marked by elongation of the human form and
by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that
are self-consciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be “mannered.”
Masculine Rhyme: See Rhyme
Measure: The foot, verse, or time sequence used
in a literary work, especially a poem. Measure is
often used somewhat incorrectly as a synonym for
meter.
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Metaphor: A figure of speech that expresses an
idea through the image of another object.
Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object
by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object.
Metaphysical Conceit: See Conceit
Metaphysical Poetry: The body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English
writers called the “Metaphysical Poets.” The group
includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The
Metaphysical Poets made use of everyday speech,
intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. They
aimed to portray the ordinary conflicts and contradictions of life. Their poems often took the form of
an argument, and many of them emphasize physical and religious love as well as the fleeting nature
of life. Elaborate conceits are typical in metaphysical poetry.
Metaphysical Poets: See Metaphysical Poetry
Meter: In literary criticism, the repetition of sound
patterns that creates a rhythm in poetry. The patterns are based on the number of syllables and the
presence and absence of accents. The unit of
rhythm in a line is called a foot. Types of meter are
classified according to the number of feet in a line.
These are the standard English lines: Monometer,
one foot; Dimeter, two feet; Trimeter, three feet;
Tetrameter, four feet; Pentameter, five feet; Hexameter, six feet (also called the Alexandrine); Heptameter, seven feet (also called the “Fourteener”
when the feet are iambic).
Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the
principles of a literary school that lasted from
roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined
by its rejection of the literary conventions of the
nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic
values.
Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a
single individual. More specifically, a speech given
by a single individual in a drama or other public
entertainment. It has no set length, although it is
usually several or more lines long.
Monometer: See Meter
Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the
author in his or her creation of the work. The mood
of a work is not always what might be expected
based on its subject matter.
Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor,
or other verbal element that recurs throughout a sin-
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gle work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time.
Motiv: See Motif
Muckrakers: An early twentieth-century group of
American writers. Typically, their works exposed
the wrongdoings of big business and government
in the United States.
Muses: Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the
daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory).
Each muse patronized a specific area of the liberal
arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or lyric poetry, Melpomene over
tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally
made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their
work.
Myth: An anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. Myths
use supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of myths, known as
mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known myths belong to the
Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies.
N
Narration: The telling of a series of events, real
or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the
account is given in a style reflecting the author’s
artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes
used as a synonym for “storyline.”
Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event
or sequence of events, real or invented. The term
is also used as an adjective in the sense “method
of narration.” For example, in literary criticism, the
expression “narrative technique” usually refers to
the way the author structures and presents his or
her story.
Narrative Poetry: A nondramatic poem in which
the author tells a story. Such poems may be of any
length or level of complexity.
Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may
be the author or a character in the story through
whom the author speaks.
Naturalism: A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement’s major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola,
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envisioned a type of fiction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientific inquiry.
The Naturalists typically viewed human beings as
either the products of “biological determinism,”
ruled by hereditary instincts and engaged in an endless struggle for survival, or as the products of “socioeconomic determinism,” ruled by social and
economic forces beyond their control. In their
works, the Naturalists generally ignored the highest levels of society and focused on degradation:
poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, insanity, and disease.
Negritude: A literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black
Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It
traces its origins to the former French colonies of
Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in
their writings: One, black alienation from traditional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western
education should be resisted. Three, black Africans
should seek to affirm and define their own identity.
Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed.
Many Negritude writers also claim that blacks can
make unique contributions to the world, based on
a heightened appreciation of nature, rhythm, and
human emotions—aspects of life they say are not
so highly valued in the materialistic and rationalistic West.
Negro Renaissance: See Harlem Renaissance
Neoclassical Period: See Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism: In literary criticism, this term refers
to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to
describe a period in European history beginning in
the late seventeenth century and lasting until about
1800. In its purest form, Neoclassicism marked a
return to order, proportion, restraint, logic, accuracy, and decorum. In England, where Neoclassicism perhaps was most popular, it reflected the
influence of seventeenth-century French writers,
especially dramatists. Neoclassical writers typically reacted against the intensity and enthusiasm
of the Renaissance period. They wrote works that
appealed to the intellect, using elevated language
and classical literary forms such as satire and the
ode. Neoclassical works were often governed by
the classical goal of instruction.
Neoclassicists: See Neoclassicism
New Criticism: A movement in literary criticism,
dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of liter-
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ature. The New Critics saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed
to examine the text alone, free from the question
of how external events—biographical or otherwise—may have helped shape it.
New Journalism: A type of writing in which the
journalist presents factual information in a form
usually used in fiction. New journalism emphasizes
description, narration, and character development
to bring readers closer to the human element of the
story, and is often used in personality profiles and
in-depth feature articles. It is not compatible with
“straight” or “hard” newswriting, which is generally composed in a brief, fact-based style.
New Journalists: See New Journalism
New Negro Movement: See Harlem Renaissance
Noble Savage: The idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he
becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is
more closely identified with such later writers as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn.
O
unknowingly killed his father and married his
mother.
Omniscience: See Point of View
Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds
express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest
sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words
that mimic the sounds they denote such as “hiss”
or “meow.” At a more subtle level, the pattern and
rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem
may be onomatopoeic.
Oral Tradition: See Oral Transmission
Oral Transmission: A process by which songs,
ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of
literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often
with variations. Memory plays a large part in the
recitation and preservation of orally transmitted
material.
Ottava Rima: An eight-line stanza of poetry composed in iambic pentameter (a five-foot line in
which each foot consists of an unaccented syllable
followed by an accented syllable), following the
abababcc rhyme scheme.
Objective Correlative: An outward set of objects,
a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to
an inward experience and evoking this experience
in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in discussions of authors’ intended effects on the emotional responses of readers.
Oxymoron: A phrase combining two contradictory
terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional.
Objectivity: A quality in writing characterized by
the absence of the author’s opinion or feeling about
the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism.
Pantheism: The idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God
at the same time. Pantheism was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and
Greece—the term derives from the Greek pan
meaning “all” and theos meaning “deity.” It later
became a significant part of the Christian faith.
Occasional Verse: Poetry written on the occasion
of a significant historical or personal event. Vers
de societe is sometimes called occasional verse although it is of a less serious nature.
Octave: A poem or stanza composed of eight lines.
The term octave most often represents the first eight
lines of a Petrarchan sonnet.
Ode: Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style.
An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme.
Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object
or individual. Odes are distinguished from other
lyric poetic forms by their complex rhythmic and
stanzaic patterns.
Oedipus Complex: A son’s amorous obsession
with his mother. The phrase is derived from the
story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who
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Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson
or answer an ethical question.
Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth.
Parallelism: A method of comparison of two ideas
in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure.
Parnassianism: A mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to well-defined artistic
forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist’s ego that dominated the work
of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the
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moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the
works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo.
The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly
influenced the later symbolist and decadent movements.
Parody: In literary criticism, this term refers to an
imitation of a serious literary work or the signature
style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner.
A typical parody adopts the style of the original
and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could
be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature
or cartoon.
Pastoral: A term derived from the Latin word “pastor,” meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary
composition on a rural theme. The conventions of
the pastoral were originated by the third-century
Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a
courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting.
The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas,
elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country
settings and shepherd characters.
Pathetic Fallacy: A term coined by English critic
John Ruskin to identify writing that falsely endows
nonhuman things with human intentions and feelings, such as “angry clouds” and “sad trees.”
Pen Name: See Pseudonym
Pentameter: See Meter
Persona: A Latin term meaning “mask.” Personae
are the characters in a fictional work of literature.
The persona generally functions as a mask through
which the author tells a story in a voice other than
his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an “implied author,” a voice created by the author to act
as the narrator for himself or herself.
Personae: See Persona
Personal Point of View: See Point of View
Personification: A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects.
Petrarchan Sonnet: See Sonnet
Phenomenology: A method of literary criticism
based on the belief that things have no existence
outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process
that takes place in the mind of the observer as he
or she contemplates an object rather than a quality
of the object itself.
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Plagiarism: Claiming another person’s written material as one’s own. Plagiarism can take the form
of direct, word-for-word copying or the theft of the
substance or idea of the work.
Platonic Criticism: A form of criticism that
stresses an artistic work’s usefulness as an agent of
social engineering rather than any quality or value
of the work itself.
Platonism: The embracing of the doctrines of the
philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the
Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is
more flexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places
more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown
aspects of life.
Plot: In literary criticism, this term refers to the
pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work.
Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and
have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes,
however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an
“episodic plot.”
Poem: In its broadest sense, a composition utilizing rhyme, meter, concrete detail, and expressive
language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal.
Poet: An author who writes poetry or verse. The
term is also used to refer to an artist or writer who
has an exceptional gift for expression, imagination,
and energy in the making of art in any form.
Poete maudit: A term derived from Paul Verlaine’s Les poetes maudits (The Accursed Poets), a
collection of essays on the French symbolist writers Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Tristan Corbiere. In the sense intended by Verlaine, the
poet is “accursed” for choosing to explore extremes
of human experience outside of middle-class
society.
Poetic Fallacy: See Pathetic Fallacy
Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not
necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded
and the evil are punished, especially in ways that
particularly fit their virtues or crimes.
Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet—for
the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is
closely related to the concept of “artistic freedom.”
Poetics: This term has two closely related meanings. It denotes (1) an aesthetic theory in literary
criticism about the essence of poetry or (2) rules
prescribing the proper methods, content, style, or
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diction of poetry. The term poetics may also refer
to theories about literature in general, not just
poetry.
Poetry: In its broadest sense, writing that aims to
present ideas and evoke an emotional experience
in the reader through the use of meter, imagery,
connotative and concrete words, and a carefully
constructed structure based on rhythmic patterns.
Poetry typically relies on words and expressions
that have several layers of meaning. It also makes
use of the effects of regular rhythm on the ear and
may make a strong appeal to the senses through the
use of imagery.
Point of View: The narrative perspective from
which a literary work is presented to the reader.
There are four traditional points of view. The “third
person omniscient” gives the reader a “godlike”
perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from
which to see actions and look into the minds of
characters. This allows the author to comment
openly on characters and events in the work. The
“third-person” point of view presents the events of
the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like the omniscient point of view,
but the reader must understand the action as it takes
place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The “first person” or
“personal” point of view relates events as they are
perceived by a single character. The main character “tells” the story and may offer opinions about
the action and characters which differ from those
of the author. Much less common than omniscient,
third person, and first person is the “secondperson” point of view, wherein the author tells the
story as if it is happening to the reader.
Polemic: A work in which the author takes a stand
on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative.
Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can
be shown to have literary value are viewed less
harshly.
Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response
made by African Americans to the black aesthetic
movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Writers
since that time have adopted a somewhat different
tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on
the disparity between black and white in the United
States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such
as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and
Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as
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looking inward for answers to their own questions,
rather than always looking to the outside world.
Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s forward
characterized by experimentation and continuing to
apply some of the fundamentals of modernism,
which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection
of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the antinovel
over the novel and the antihero over the hero.
Pre-Raphaelites: A circle of writers and artists in
mid nineteenth-century England. Valuing the preRenaissance artistic qualities of religious symbolism, lavish pictorialism, and natural sensuousness,
the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a sense of mystery
and melancholy that influenced later writers associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements.
Primitivism: The belief that primitive peoples
were nobler and less flawed than civilized peoples
because they had not been subjected to the corrupt
influence of society.
Projective Verse: A form of free verse in which
the poet’s breathing pattern determines the lines of
the poem. Poets who advocate projective verse are
against all formal structures in writing, including
meter and form.
Prologue: An introductory section of a literary
work. It often contains information establishing the
situation of the characters or presents information
about the setting, time period, or action. In drama,
the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the
principal characters.
Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror
the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished
from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences.
Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form
a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel.
Prosopopoeia: See Personification
Protagonist: The central character of a story who
serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and
as the principal rationale for its development. The
protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions
of modern literature as the hero or antihero.
Proverb: A brief, sage saying that expresses a truth
about life in a striking manner.
Pseudonym: A name assumed by a writer, most
often intended to prevent his or her identification
as the author of a work. Two or more authors may
work together under one pseudonym, or an author
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may use a different name for each genre he or she
publishes in. Some publishing companies maintain
“house pseudonyms,” under which any number of
authors may write installations in a series. Some
authors also choose a pseudonym over their real
names the way an actor may use a stage name.
Pun: A play on words that have similar sounds but
different meanings.
Pure Poetry: poetry written without instructional
intent or moral purpose that aims only to please a
reader by its imagery or musical flow. The term
pure poetry is used as the antonym of the term
“didacticism.”
Q
Quatrain: A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines.
R
Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary
movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner.
This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any
realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The
realistic method may be altered or extended, as in
stream of consciousness writing, to record highly
subjective experience.
Refrain: A phrase repeated at intervals throughout
a poem. A refrain may appear at the end of each
stanza or at less regular intervals. It may be altered
slightly at each appearance.
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Restoration: See Restoration Age
Restoration Age: A period in English literature beginning with the crowning of Charles II in 1660
and running to about 1700. The era, which was
characterized by a reaction against Puritanism, was
the first great age of the comedy of manners. The
finest literature of the era is typically witty and urbane, and often lewd.
Rhetoric: In literary criticism, this term denotes
the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense,
rhetoric adheres to various principles developed
since classical times for arranging facts and ideas
in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term
is also used to refer to effective prose in general
and theories of or methods for composing effective
prose.
Rhetorical Question: A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the
reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and
other persuasive genres.
Rhyme: When used as a noun in literary criticism,
this term generally refers to a poem in which words
sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines. Rhymes are
classified into different types according to where
they fall in a line or stanza or according to the degree of similarity they exhibit in their spellings and
sounds. Some major types of rhyme are “masculine” rhyme, “feminine” rhyme, and “triple” rhyme.
In a masculine rhyme, the rhyming sound falls in
a single accented syllable, as with “heat” and “eat.”
Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two syllables, one
stressed and one unstressed, as with “merry” and
“tarry.” Triple rhyme matches the sound of the accented syllable and the two unaccented syllables
that follow: “narrative” and “declarative.”
Renaissance: The period in European history that
marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in
Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms,
it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not
reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or
so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost
every sphere of human activity, especially science,
philosophy, and the arts. The period is best defined
by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual, and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with
the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and
spiritual salvation.
Rhyme Royal: A stanza of seven lines composed
in iambic pentameter and rhymed ababbcc. The
name is said to be a tribute to King James I of Scotland, who made much use of the form in his poetry.
Repartee: Conversation featuring snappy retorts
and witticisms.
Rococo: A style of European architecture that
flourished in the eighteenth century, especially in
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Rhyme Scheme: See Rhyme
Rhythm: A regular pattern of sound, time intervals, or events occurring in writing, most often and
most discernably in poetry. Regular, reliable
rhythm is known to be soothing to humans, while
interrupted, unpredictable, or rapidly changing
rhythm is disturbing. These effects are known to
authors, who use them to produce a desired reaction in the reader.
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France. The most notable features of rococo are its
extensive use of ornamentation and its themes of
lightness, gaiety, and intimacy. In literary criticism,
the term is often used disparagingly to refer to a
decadent or overly ornamental style.
Romance:
Romantic Age: See Romanticism
Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted
meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that
sought greater freedom of personal expression than
that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and
logic of the eighteenth-century Neoclassicists. The
Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the
individual to be at the center of all experience and
so placed him or her at the center of their art. The
Romantics believed that the creative imagination
reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic
or by scientific examination. Both the natural world
and the state of childhood were important sources
for revelations of “eternal truths.” “Romanticism”
is also used as a general term to refer to a type of
sensibility found in all periods of literary history
and usually considered to be in opposition to the
principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism
signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted
to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be
discovered by human reason.
Romantics: See Romanticism
Russian Symbolism: A Russian poetic movement,
derived from French symbolism, that flourished between 1894 and 1910. While some Russian Symbolists continued in the French tradition, stressing
aestheticism and the importance of suggestion
above didactic intent, others saw their craft as a
form of mystical worship, and themselves as mediators between the supernatural and the mundane.
S
Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit
to criticize and provoke change in human nature
and institutions. There are two major types of
satire: “formal” or “direct” satire speaks directly to
the reader or to a character in the work; “indirect”
satire relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. Formal satire is further divided into two manners: the “Horatian,” which
2 3 6
ridicules gently, and the “Juvenalian,” which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly.
Scansion: The analysis or “scanning” of a poem to
determine its meter and often its rhyme scheme.
The most common system of scansion uses accents
(slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show
stressed syllables, breves (curved lines drawn
above syllables) to show unstressed syllables, and
vertical lines to separate each foot.
Second Person: See Point of View
Semiotics: The study of how literary forms and
conventions affect the meaning of language.
Sestet: Any six-line poem or stanza.
Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the
action of a narrative takes place. The elements of
setting may include geographic location, characters’ physical and mental environments, prevailing
cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the
action takes place.
Shakespearean Sonnet: See Sonnet
Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster figure in
black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the nineteenth century.
Simile: A comparison, usually using “like” or “as,”
of two essentially dissimilar things, as in “coffee
as cold as ice” or “He sounded like a broken
record.”
Slang: A type of informal verbal communication
that is generally unacceptable for formal writing.
Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point;
they may also be shortened versions of an oftenused word or phrase.
Slant Rhyme: See Consonance
Slave Narrative: Autobiographical accounts of
American slave life as told by escaped slaves.
These works first appeared during the abolition
movement of the 1830s through the 1850s.
Social Realism: See Socialist Realism
Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of
literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and
established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress
of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist
worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to
the working classes and themes of social struggle
featuring strong proletarian heroes.
Soliloquy: A monologue in a drama used to give
the audience information and to develop the
speaker’s character. It is typically a projection of
the speaker’s innermost thoughts. Usually deliv-
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ered while the speaker is alone on stage, a soliloquy is intended to present an illusion of unspoken
reflection.
Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem, usually composed
in iambic pentameter, employing one of several
rhyme schemes. There are three major types of sonnets, upon which all other variations of the form
are based: the “Petrarchan” or “Italian” sonnet, the
“Shakespearean” or “English” sonnet, and the
“Spenserian” sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet consists
of an octave rhymed abbaabba and a “sestet”
rhymed either cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave poses a question or problem, relates a narrative, or puts forth a proposition; the sestet presents
a solution to the problem, comments upon the narrative, or applies the proposition put forth in the
octave. The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into
three quatrains and a couplet rhymed abab cdcd
efef gg. The couplet provides an epigrammatic
comment on the narrative or problem put forth in
the quatrains. The Spenserian sonnet uses three
quatrains and a couplet like the Shakespearean, but
links their three rhyme schemes in this way: abab
bcbc cdcd ee. The Spenserian sonnet develops its
theme in two parts like the Petrarchan, its final six
lines resolving a problem, analyzing a narrative, or
applying a proposition put forth in its first eight
lines.
Spenserian Sonnet: See Sonnet
Spenserian Stanza: A nine-line stanza having
eight verses in iambic pentameter, its ninth verse
in iambic hexameter, and the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc.
Spondee: In poetry meter, a foot consisting of two
long or stressed syllables occurring together. This
form is quite rare in English verse, and is usually
composed of two monosyllabic words.
Sprung Rhythm: Versification using a specific
number of accented syllables per line but disregarding the number of unaccented syllables that fall
in each line, producing an irregular rhythm in the
poem.
Stanza: A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines
grouped together, often in recurring patterns of
rhyme, line length, and meter. Stanzas may also
serve as units of thought in a poem much like paragraphs in prose.
Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name
for a duplication made during the printing process;
this led to its modern definition as a person or thing
that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others
of its type.
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Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique
for rendering the inward experience of a character.
This technique is designed to give the impression
of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions,
images, and memories in the spontaneous and
seemingly illogical order that they occur in life.
Structuralism: A twentieth-century movement in
literary criticism that examines how literary texts
arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings
themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of
linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other
interprets the way literary forms and conventions
affect the meaning of language itself.
Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature.
The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or
seemingly “unstructured” prose.
Sturm und Drang: A German term meaning
“storm and stress.” It refers to a German literary
movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted
against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of
extraordinary individuals.
Style: A writer’s distinctive manner of arranging
words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality
upon his or her writing, style is the product of an
author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use
of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm,
figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other
elements of composition.
Subject: The person, event, or theme at the center
of a work of literature. A work may have one or
more subjects of each type, with shorter works
tending to have fewer and longer works tending to
have more.
Subjectivity: Writing that expresses the author’s
personal feelings about his subject, and which may
or may not include factual information about the
subject.
Surrealism: A term introduced to criticism by
Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by Andre
Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic
movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists
sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used
for achieving this aim was automatic writing—transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the
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contrary levels of conscious and unconscious,
dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into
a new level of “super-realism.”
stanza rhyming with the first and third lines of the
following stanza.
Suspense: A literary device in which the author
maintains the audience’s attention through the
buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon
be revealed.
Textual Criticism: A branch of literary criticism
that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all
known manuscripts or printings of a single work in
order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a
definitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to
the author’s original intention.
Syllogism: A method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists
of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.
Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for
something else without losing its original identity.
In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry
complex associations of meaning no matter what
their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works.
Symbolism: This term has two widely accepted
meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early
modernist literary movement initiated in France
during the nineteenth century that reacted against
the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this
movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world
of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal
emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely
identifiable with the individual poet. The principal
aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the
highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday
contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term
“symbolism” refers to the use of one object to represent another.
Symbolist: See Symbolism
Symbolist Movement: See Symbolism
Sympathetic Fallacy: See Affective Fallacy
T
Tanka: A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku.
A tanka is five lines long, with the lines containing five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively.
Terza Rima: A three-line stanza form in poetry in
which the rhymes are made on the last word of each
line in the following manner: the first and third
lines of the first stanza, then the second line of the
first stanza and the first and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any
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Tetrameter: See Meter
Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The
term is used interchangeably with thesis.
Thesis: A thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays
share the quality of containing a thesis which is
supported through the action of the story.
Third Person: See Point of View
Tone: The author’s attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work.
A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a
friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader.
The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words
he or she uses in discussing it.
Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who,
because of some tragic character flaw or hamartia,
brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its
subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using
poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and
bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions.
The tragic form was practiced extensively by the
ancient Greeks. In the Middle Ages, when classical works were virtually unknown, tragedy came to
denote any works about the fall of persons from
exalted to low conditions due to any reason: fate,
vice, weakness, etc. According to the classical definition of tragedy, such works present the “pathetic”—that which evokes pity—rather than the
tragic. The classical form of tragedy was revived
in the sixteenth century; it flourished especially on
the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists
have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of
modern society by drawing their heroes from the
ranks of ordinary men and women and defining the
nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than
exalted social standing.
Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the
hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall.
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Transcendentalism: An American philosophical
and religious movement, based in New England
from around 1835 until the Civil War. Transcendentalism was a form of American romanticism
that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas
Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe. The Transcendentalists stressed the
importance of intuition and subjective experience
in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and
scientific naturalism. They pursued truths that lie
beyond the “colorless” realms perceived by reason
and the senses and were active social reformers in
public education, women’s rights, and the abolition
of slavery.
Trickster: A character or figure common in Native American and African literature who uses his
ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difficult situations. Tricksters are most often animals, such as
the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take
the form of humans as well.
Trimeter: See Meter
Triple Rhyme: See Rhyme
Trochee: See Foot
U
Understatement: See Irony
Unities: Strict rules of dramatic structure, formulated by Italian and French critics of the Renaissance and based loosely on the principles of drama
discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics. Foremost
among these rules were the three unities of action,
time, and place that compelled a dramatist to: (1)
construct a single plot with a beginning, middle,
and end that details the causal relationships of action and character; (2) restrict the action to the
events of a single day; and (3) limit the scene to a
single place or city. The unities were observed
faithfully by continental European writers until the
Romantic Age, but they were never regularly observed in English drama. Modern dramatists are
typically more concerned with a unity of impression or emotional effect than with any of the classical unities.
Urban Realism: A branch of realist writing that
attempts to accurately reflect the often harsh facts
of modern urban existence.
Utopia: A fictional perfect place, such as “paradise” or “heaven.”
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Utopian: See Utopia
Utopianism: See Utopia
V
Verisimilitude: Literally, the appearance of truth.
In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a
work of literature that seem true to the reader.
Vers de societe: See Occasional Verse
Vers libre: See Free Verse
Verse: A line of metered language, a line of a
poem, or any work written in verse.
Versification: The writing of verse. Versification
may also refer to the meter, rhyme, and other mechanical components of a poem.
Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen
Victoria of England (1837–1901) and to anything
with qualities typical of that era. For example, the
qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois
materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish
morality are often considered Victorian. This
stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles
Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which
stirred strong debates in England) and the critical
attitudes of serious Victorian writers like Charles
Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel,
and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism.
Victorian Age: See Victorian
Victorian Period: See Victorian
W
Weltanschauung: A German term referring to a
person’s worldview or philosophy.
Weltschmerz: A German term meaning “world
pain.” It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude.
Z
Zarzuela: A type of Spanish operetta.
Zeitgeist: A German term meaning “spirit of the
time.” It refers to the moral and intellectual trends
of a given era.
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A
Acosta, Teresa Palomo
My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12
An African Elegy (Duncan): V13
Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?
(Hardy): V4
Alabama Centennial (Madgett): V10
American Poetry (Simpson): V7
An Arundel Tomb (Larkin): V12
Anasazi (Snyder): V9
Angelou, Maya
Harlem Hopscotch: V2
On the Pulse of Morning: V3
Angle of Geese (Momaday): V2
Annabel Lee (Poe): V9
Anniversary (Harjo): V15
Anonymous
Barbara Allan: V7
Go Down, Moses: V11
Lord Randal: V6
The Seafarer: V8
Sir Patrick Spens: V4
Swing Low Sweet Chariot: V1
Anorexic (Boland): V12
Any Human to Another (Cullen): V3
A Pièd (McElroy): V3
Arnold, Matthew
Dover Beach: V2
Ars Poetica (MacLeish): V5
As I Walked Out One Evening
(Auden): V4
Ashbery, John
Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11
Astonishment (Szymborska): V15
At the Bomb Testing Site (Stafford): V8
Atwood, Margaret
Siren Song: V7
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Auden, W. H.
As I Walked Out One Evening: V4
Funeral Blues: V10
Musée des Beaux Arts: V1
The Unknown Citizen: V3
Auto Wreck (Shapiro): V3
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry,
Ohio (Wright): V8
B
Ballad of Orange and Grape
(Rukeyser): V10
Baraka, Amiri
In Memory of Radio: V9
Barbara Allan (Anonymous): V7
Barbie Doll (Piercy): V9
Ballad of Birmingham (Randall): V5
Barrett, Elizabeth
Sonnet 43: V2
The Base Stealer (Francis): V12
The Bean Eaters (Brooks): V2
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
(Dickinson): V2
Bedtime Story (MacBeth): V8
The Bells (Poe): V3
Beowulf (Wilbur): V11
Beware: Do Not Read This Poem
(Reed): V6
Beware of Ruins (Hope): V8
Bidwell Ghost (Erdrich): V14
Birch Canoe (Revard): V5
Birches (Frost): V13
Birney, Earle
Vancouver Lights: V8
A Birthday (Rossetti): V10
Bishop, Elizabeth
Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6
Filling Station: V12
Blackberrying (Plath): V15
Black Zodiac (Wright): V10
Blake, William
The Lamb: V12
The Tyger: V2
A Blessing (Wright): V7
Blood Oranges (Mueller): V13
Blumenthal, Michael
Inventors: V7
Bly, Robert
Come with Me: V6
Boland, Eavan
Anorexic: V12
Bradstreet, Anne
To My Dear and Loving
Husband: V6
Brazil, January 1, 1502 (Bishop):
V6
Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast
as Thou Art (Keats): V9
Brooke, Rupert
The Soldier: V7
Brooks, Gwendolyn
The Bean Eaters: V2
The Sonnet-Ballad: V1
Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4
We Real Cool: V6
Brouwer, Joel
Last Request: V14
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Sonnet 43: V2
Browning, Robert
My Last Duchess: V1
Porphyria’s Lover: V15
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Cumulative Author/Title Index
Cumulative
Author/Title Index
B u r n s ,
R o b e r t
Burns, Robert
A Red, Red Rose: V8
The Bustle in a House (Dickinson):
V10
Butcher Shop (Simic): V7
Byron, Lord
The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1
She Walks in Beauty: V14
C
The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer): V14
Cargoes (Masefield): V5
Carroll, Lewis
Jabberwocky: V11
Casey at the Bat (Thayer): V5
Cavalry Crossing a Ford (Whitman):
V13
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(Tennyson): V1
Chaucer, Geoffrey
The Canterbury Tales: V14
Chicago (Sandburg): V3
Chocolates (Simpson): V11
Clifton, Lucille
Climbing: V14
Miss Rosie: V1
Climbing (Clifton): V14
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Kubla Khan: V5
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
V4
Come with Me (Bly): V6
The Constellation Orion (Kooser):
V8
Concord Hymn (Emerson): V4
The Conquerors (McGinley): V13
Cool Tombs (Sandburg): V6
Courage (Sexton): V14
The Courage That My Mother Had
(Millay): V3
Crane, Stephen
War Is Kind: V9
The Creation (Johnson): V1
The Cremation of Sam McGee
(Service): V10
Cullen, Countee
Any Human to Another: V3
cummings, e. e.
l(a: V1
i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13
maggie and milly and molly and
may: V12
old age sticks: V3
The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A
Barn in the Urals (Dubie):
V12
D
Darwin in 1881 (Schnackenberg): V13
Dawe, Bruce
Drifters: V10
2 4 2
Daylights (Warren): V13
Dear Reader (Tate): V10
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
(Jarrell): V2
The Death of the Hired Man (Frost): V4
Deep Woods (Nemerov): V14
The Destruction of Sennacherib
(Byron): V1
Dickey, James
The Heaven of Animals: V6
The Hospital Window: V11
Dickinson, Emily
Because I Could Not Stop for
Death: V2
The Bustle in a House: V10
“Hope” Is the Thing with
Feathers: V3
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I
Died—: V5
My Life Closed Twice Before Its
Close: V8
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass:
V11
The Soul Selects Her Own
Society: V1
There’s a Certain Slant of Light:
V6
This Is My Letter to the World: V4
Digging (Heaney): V5
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good
Night (Thomas): V1
Donne, John
Holy Sonnet 10: V2
A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning: V11
Dove, Rita
Geometry: V15
This Life: V1
Dover Beach (Arnold): V2
Dream Variations (Hughes): V15
Drifters (Dawe): V10
A Drink of Water (Heaney): V8
Drought Year (Wright): V8
Dubie, Norman
The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter.
A Barn in the Urals: V12
Du Bois, W. E. B.
The Song of the Smoke: V13
Duncan, Robert
An African Elegy: V13
Dugan, Alan
How We Heard the Name: V10
Dulce et Decorum Est (Owen): V10
Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard (Gray): V9
Eliot, T. S.
Journey of the Magi: V7
The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock: V1
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Concord Hymn: V4
Erdrich, Louise
Bidwell Ghost: V14
Espada, Martín
We Live by What We See at
Night: V13
Ethics (Pastan): V8
The Exhibit (Mueller): V9
F
Facing It (Komunyakaa): V5
Falling Upon Earth (Bashō): V2
A Far Cry from Africa (Walcott): V6
A Farewell to English (Hartnett): V10
Fenton, James
The Milkfish Gatherers: V11
Fern Hill (Thomas): V3
Fifteen (Stafford): V2
Filling Station (Bishop): V12
Fire and Ice (Frost): V7
The Fish (Moore): V14
For a New Citizen of These United
States (Lee): V15
For An Assyrian Frieze (Viereck): V9
For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron
St.-Castin (Nowlan): V12
For the Union Dead (Lowell): V7
For the White poets who would be
Indian (Rose): V13
The Force That Through the Green
Fuse Drives the Flower
(Thomas): V8
Four Mountain Wolves (Silko): V9
Francis, Robert
The Base Stealer: V12
Frost, Robert
Birches: V13
The Death of the Hired Man: V4
Fire and Ice: V7
Mending Wall: V5
Nothing Gold Can Stay: V3
Out, Out—: V10
The Road Not Taken: V2
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening: V1
The Wood-Pile: V6
Funeral Blues (Auden): V10
E
The Eagle (Tennyson): V11
Easter 1916 (Yeats): V5
Eating Poetry (Strand): V9
Elegy for My Father, Who is Not
Dead (Hudgins): V14
G
Geometry (Dove): V15
Ginsberg, Allen
A Supermarket in California: V5
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
M a c L e i s h ,
Glück, Louise
The Gold Lily: V5
The Mystery: V15
Go Down, Moses (Anonymous): V11
The Gold Lily (Glück): V5
A Grafted Tongue (Montague): V12
Graham, Jorie
The Hiding Place: V10
Gray, Thomas
Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard: V9
Gunn, Thom
The Missing: V9
H
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I
The Idea of Order at Key West
(Stevens): V13
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
(Dickinson): V13
I Hear America Singing (Whitman):
V3
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—
(Dickinson): V5
In a Station of the Metro (Pound): V2
Incident in a Rose Garden (Justice):
V14
In Flanders Fields (McCrae): V5
In Memory of Radio (Baraka): V9
In the Land of Shinar (Levertov): V7
In the Suburbs (Simpson): V14
Inventors (Blumentha): V7
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
(Yeats): V1
Island of the Three Marias (Ríos): V11
i was sitting in mcsorley’s
(cummings): V13
J
Jabberwocky (Carroll): V11
Jarrell, Randall
The Death of the Ball Turret
Gunner: V2
Jeffers, Robinson
Hurt Hawks: V3
Shine Perishing Republic: V4
Johnson, James Weldon
The Creation: V1
Journey of the Magi (Eliot): V7
Justice, Donald
Incident in a Rose Garden: V14
K
Keats, John
Bright Star! Would I Were
Steadfast as Thou Art: V9
Ode on a Grecian Urn: V1
Ode to a Nightingale: V3
When I Have Fears that I May
Cease to Be: V2
Kenyon, Jane
“Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School”: V9
Kilroy (Viereck): V14
King James Bible
Psalm 8: V9
Psalm 23: V4
Kinnell, Galway
Saint Francis and the Sow: V9
Kooser, Ted
The Constellation Orion: V8
Komunyakaa, Yusef
Facing It: V5
Kubla Khan (Coleridge): V5
Kunitz, Stanley
The War Against the Trees: V11
Cumulative Author/Title Index
H.D.
Helen: V6
Hall, Donald
Names of Horses: V8
Hardy, Thomas
Ah, Are You Digging on My
Grave?: V4
The Man He Killed: V3
Harjo, Joy
Anniversary: V15
Harlem (Hughes): V1
Harlem Hopscotch (Angelou): V2
Hartnett, Michael
A Farewell to English: V10
Having a Coke with You (O’Hara): V12
Hawk Roosting (Hughes): V4
Hayden, Robert
Those Winter Sundays: V1
Heaney, Seamus
A Drink of Water: V8
Digging: V5
Midnight: V2
Hecht, Anthony
“More Light! More Light!”: V6
The Heaven of Animals (Dickey): V6
Helen (H.D.): V6
Herrick, Robert
To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time: V13
The Hiding Place (Graham): V10
High Windows (Larkin): V3
The Highwayman (Noyes): V4
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Old Ironsides: V9
Holy Sonnet 10 (Donne): V2
Hope, A. D.
Beware of Ruins: V8
Hope Is a Tattered Flag (Sandburg):
V12
“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers
(Dickinson): V3
The Horizons of Rooms (Merwin): V15
The Hospital Window (Dickey): V11
Housman, A. E.
To an Athlete Dying Young: V7
When I Was One-and-Twenty: V4
How We Heard the Name (Dugan):
V10
Howe, Marie
What Belongs to Us: V15
Hudgins, Andrew
Elegy for My Father, Who is Not
Dead: V14
Hughes, Langston
Dream Variations: V15
Harlem: V1
Mother to Son: V3
The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10
Theme for English B: V6
Hughes, Ted
Hawk Roosting: V4
Hunger in New York City (Ortiz): V4
Hurt Hawks (Jeffers): V3
A r c h i b a l d
L
l(a (cummings): V1
The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson): V15
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (Yeats): V15
The Lamb (Blake): V12
Lament for the Dorsets (Purdy): V5
Landscape with Tractor (Taylor): V10
Lanier, Sidney
Song of the Chattahoochee: V14
Larkin, Philip
An Arundel Tomb: V12
High Windows: V3
Toads: V4
Last Request (Brouwer): V14
Lawrence, D. H.
Piano: V6
Layton, Irving
A Tall Man Executes a Jig: V12
Leda and the Swan (Yeats): V13
Lee, Li-Young
For a New Citizen of These
United States: V15
The Weight of Sweetness: V11
Levertov, Denise
In the Land of Shinar: V7
Leviathan (Merwin): V5
Levine, Philip
Starlight: V8
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
A Psalm of Life: V7
Paul Revere’s Ride: V2
Lord Randal (Anonymous): V6
Lost Sister (Song): V5
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(Eliot): V1
Lowell, Robert
For the Union Dead: V7
The Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket: V6
M
MacBeth, George
Bedtime Story: V8
MacLeish, Archibald
Ars Poetica: V5
2 4 3
M a d g e t t ,
N a o m i
L o n g
Madgett, Naomi Long
Alabama Centennial: V10
maggie and milly and molly and may
(cummings): V12
The Man He Killed (Hardy): V3
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
(Raine): V7
Marvell, Andrew
To His Coy Mistress: V5
Masefield, John
Cargoes: V5
Matsuo Bashō
Falling Upon Earth: V2
The Moon Glows the Same: V7
McCrae, John
In Flanders Fields: V5
McElroy, Colleen
A Pièd: V3
McGinley, Phyllis
The Conquerors: V13
Reactionary Essay on Applied
Science: V9
McKay, Claude
The Tropics in New York: V4
Meeting the British (Muldoon): V7
Mending Wall (Frost): V5
Merriam, Eve
Onomatopoeia: V6
Merwin, W. S.
The Horizons of Rooms: V15
Leviathan: V5
Midnight (Heaney): V2
The Milkfish Gatherers (Fenton): V11
Millay, Edna St. Vincent
The Courage That My Mother
Had: V3
Milton, John
[On His Blindness] Sonnet 16: V3
Mirror (Plath): V1
Miss Rosie (Clifton): V1
The Missing (Gunn): V9
Momaday, N. Scott
Angle of Geese: V2
To a Child Running With
Outstretched Arms in Canyon
de Chelly: V11
Montague, John
A Grafted Tongue: V12
The Moon Glows the Same (Bashō):
V7
Moore, Marianne
The Fish: V14
“More Light! More Light!” (Hecht):
V6
Mother to Son (Hughes): V3
Muldoon, Paul
Meeting the British: V7
Mueller, Lisel
Blood Oranges: V13
The Exhibit: V9
Musée des Beaux Arts (Auden): V1
Music Lessons (Oliver): V8
My Last Duchess (Browning): V1
2 4 4
My Life Closed Twice Before Its
Close (Dickinson): V8
My Mother Pieced Quilts (Acosta):
V12
My Papa’s Waltz (Roethke): V3
The Mystery (Glück): V15
N
Names of Horses (Hall): V8
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
(Dickinson): V11
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
(Hughes): V10
Nemerov, Howard
Deep Woods: V14
The Phoenix: V10
Neruda, Pablo
Tonight I Can Write: V11
Not Waving but Drowning (Smith): V3
Nothing Gold Can Stay (Frost): V3
Nowlan, Alden
For Jean Vincent D’abbadie,
Baron St.-Castin: V12
Noyes, Alfred
The Highwayman: V4
The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
(Raleigh): V14
Pastan, Linda
Ethics: V8
Paul Revere’s Ride (Longfellow): V2
The Phoenix (Nemerov): V10
Piano (Lawrence): V6
Piercy, Marge
Barbie Doll: V9
Plath, Sylvia
Blackberrying: V15
Mirror: V1
A Psalm of Life (Longfellow): V7
Poe, Edgar Allan
Annabel Lee: V9
The Bells: V3
The Raven: V1
Pope, Alexander
The Rape of the Lock: V12
Porphyria’s Lover (Browning): V15
Pound, Ezra
In a Station of the Metro: V2
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A
Letter: V8
Psalm 8 (King James Bible): V9
Psalm 23 (King James Bible): V4
Purdy, Al
Lament for the Dorsets: V5
Wilderness Gothic: V12
O
Q
O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman):
V2
Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats): V1
Ode to a Nightingale (Keats): V3
Ode to the West Wind (Shelley): V2
O’Hara, Frank
Having a Coke with You: V12
Why I Am Not a Painter: V8
old age sticks (cummings): V3
Old Ironsides (Holmes): V9
Oliver, Mary
Music Lessons: V8
Wild Geese: V15
[On His Blindness] Sonnet 16
(Milton): V3
Ondaatje, Michael
To a Sad Daughter: V8
On Freedom’s Ground (Wilbur): V12
Onomatopoeia (Merriam): V6
On the Pulse of Morning (Angelou):
V3
Ortiz, Simon
Hunger in New York City: V4
Out, Out— (Frost): V10
Overture to a Dance of Locomotives
(Williams): V11
Owen, Wilfred
Dulce et Decorum Est: V10
Oysters (Sexton): V4
P
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
(Ashbery): V11
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
(Lowell): V6
Queen-Ann’s-Lace (Williams): V6
R
Raine, Craig
A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home: V7
Raleigh, Walter, Sir
The Nymph’s Reply to the
Shepherd: V14
Randall, Dudley
Ballad of Birmingham: V5
The Rape of the Lock (Pope): V12
The Raven (Poe): V1
Reactionary Essay on Applied
Science (McGinley): V9
A Red, Red Rose (Burns): V8
The Red Wheelbarrow (Williams): V1
Reed, Ishmael
Beware: Do Not Read This Poem:
V6
Remember (Rossetti): V14
Revard, Carter
Birch Canoe: V5
Rich, Adrienne
Rusted Legacy: V15
Richard Cory (Robinson): V4
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(Coleridge): V4
Ríos, Alberto
Island of the Three Marias: V11
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
W h e a t l e y ,
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
(Pound): V8
The Road Not Taken (Frost): V2
Robinson, E. A.
Richard Cory: V4
Roethke, Theodore
My Papa’s Waltz: V3
Rose, Wendy
For the White poets who would be
Indian: V13
Rossetti, Christina
A Birthday: V10
Remember: V14
Rukeyser, Muriel
Ballad of Orange and Grape: V10
Rusted Legacy (Rich): V15
V o l u m e
1 5
T
A Tall Man Executes a Jig (Layton):
V12
Tate, James
Dear Reader: V10
Smart and Final Iris: V15
Taylor, Henry
Landscape with Tractor: V10
Tears, Idle Tears (Tennyson): V4
Teasdale, Sara
There Will Come Soft Rains: V14
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord
The Charge of the Light Brigade:
V1
The Eagle: V11
The Lady of Shalott: V15
Tears, Idle Tears: V4
Ulysses: V2
Thayer, Ernest Lawrence
Casey at the Bat: V5
Theme for English B (Hughes): V6
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
(Dickinson): V6
There Will Come Soft Rains
(Teasdale): V14
This Life (Dove): V1
Thomas, Dylan
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good
Night: V1
Fern Hill: V3
The Force That Through the
Green Fuse Drives the
Flower: V8
Those Winter Sundays (Hayden): V1
Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth): V2
To an Athlete Dying Young
(Housman): V7
To a Child Running With
Outstretched Arms in Canyon
de Chelly (Momaday): V11
To a Sad Daughter (Ondaatje): V8
To His Coy Mistress (Marvell): V5
To His Excellency General
Washington (Wheatley): V13
To My Dear and Loving Husband
(Bradstreet): V6
To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time (Herrick): V13
Toads (Larkin): V4
Tonight I Can Write (Neruda): V11
The Tropics in New York (McKay): V4
The Tyger (Blake): V2
Cumulative Author/Title Index
S
Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats): V2
Saint Francis and the Sow (Kinnell):
V9
Sandburg, Carl
Chicago: V3
Cool Tombs: V6
Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12
Schnackenberg, Gjertrud
Darwin in 1881: V13
The Seafarer (Anonymous): V8
The Second Coming (Yeats): V7
Service, Robert W.
The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10
Sexton, Anne
Courage: V14
Oysters: V4
Shakespeare, William
Sonnet 18: V2
Sonnet 19: V9
Sonnet 29: V8
Sonnet 30: V4
Sonnet 55: V5
Sonnet 116: V3
Sonnet 130: V1
Shapiro, Karl
Auto Wreck: V3
She Walks in Beauty (Byron): V14
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Ode to the West Wind: V2
Shine, Perishing Republic (Jeffers): V4
Silko, Leslie Marmon
Four Mountain Wolves: V9
Simic, Charles
Butcher Shop: V7
Simpson, Louis
American Poetry: V7
Chocolates: V11
In the Suburbs: V14
Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous): V4
Siren Song (Atwood): V7
Small Town with One Road (Soto): V7
Smart and Final Iris (Tate): V15
Smith, Stevie
Not Waving but Drowning: V3
Snyder, Gary
Anasazi: V9
The Soldier (Brooke): V7
Song, Cathy
Lost Sister: V5
Song of the Chattahoochee (Lanier):
V14
The Song of the Smoke (Du Bois): V13
Sonnet 16 [On His Blindness]
(Milton): V3
Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare): V2
Sonnet 19 (Shakespeare): V9
Sonnet 30 (Shakespeare): V4
Sonnet 29 (Shakespeare): V8
Sonnet 43 (Browning): V2
Sonnet 55 (Shakespeare): V5
Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare): V3
Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare): V1
The Sonnet-Ballad (Brooks): V1
Soto, Gary
Small Town with One Road: V7
The Soul Selects Her Own Society
(Dickinson): V1
Stafford, William
At the Bomb Testing Site: V8
Fifteen: V2
Starlight (Levine): V8
Stevens, Wallace
The Idea of Order at Key West:
V13
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening (Frost): V1
Strand, Mark
Eating Poetry: V9
Strong Men, Riding Horses (Brooks):
V4
A Supermarket in California
(Ginsberg): V5
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
(Anonymous): V1
Szymborska, Wislawa
Astonishment: V15
P h i l l i s
U
Ulysses (Tennyson): V2
The Unknown Citizen (Auden): V3
V
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
(Donne): V11
Vancouver Lights (Birney): V8
Viereck, Peter
For An Assyrian Frieze: V9
Kilroy: V14
W
Walcott, Derek
A Far Cry from Africa: V6
The War Against the Trees (Kunitz):
V11
War Is Kind (Crane): V9
Warren, Rosanna
Daylights: V13
We Live by What We See at Night
(Espada): V13
We Real Cool (Brooks): V6
The Weight of Sweetness (Lee): V11
What Belongs to Us (Howe): V15
Wheatley, Phillis
To His Excellency General
Washington: V13
2 4 5
W h e n
I
H a v e
F e a r s
When I Have Fears That I May
Cease to Be (Keats): V2
When I Was One-and-Twenty
(Housman): V4
Whitman, Walt
Cavalry Crossing a Ford: V13
I Hear America Singing: V3
O Captain! My Captain!: V2
Why I Am Not a Painter (O’Hara): V8
Wilbur, Richard
Beowulf: V11
On Freedom’s Ground: V12
Wild Geese (Oliver): V15
Wilderness Gothic (Purdy): V12
2 4 6
T h a t
I
M a y
C e a s e
Williams, William Carlos
Overture to a Dance of
Locomotives: V11
Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6
The Red Wheelbarrow: V1
The Wood-Pile (Frost): V6
Wordsworth, William
Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey: V2
Wright, Charles
Black Zodiac: V10
Wright, James
A Blessing: V7
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry,
Ohio: V8
t o
B e
Wright, Judith
Drought Year: V8
Y
Yeats, William Butler
Easter 1916: V5
An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death: V1
The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15
Leda and the Swan: V13
Sailing to Byzantium: V2
The Second Coming: V7
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Acoma Pueblo
Ortiz, Simon
Hunger in New York City: V4
African American
Angelou, Maya
Harlem Hopscotch: V2
On the Pulse of Morning: V3
Baraka, Amiri
In Memory of Radio: V9
Brooks, Gwendolyn
The Bean Eaters: V2
The Sonnet-Ballad: V1
Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4
We Real Cool: V6
Clifton, Lucille
Climbing: V14
Miss Rosie: V1
Cullen, Countee
Any Human to Another: V3
Dove, Rita
Geometry: V15
This Life: V1
Hayden, Robert
Those Winter Sundays: V1
Hughes, Langston
Dream Variations: V15
Harlem: V1
Mother to Son: V3
The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10
Theme for English B: V6
Johnson, James Weldon
The Creation: V1
Komunyakaa, Yusef
Facing It: V5
Madgett, Naomi Long
Alabama Centennial: V10
V o l u m e
1 5
McElroy, Colleen
A Pièd: V3
Randall, Dudley
Ballad of Birmingham: V5
Reed, Ishmael
Beware: Do Not Read This Poem:
V6
American
Acosta, Teresa Palomo
My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12
Angelou, Maya
Harlem Hopscotch: V2
On the Pulse of Morning: V3
Ashbery, John
Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11
Auden, W. H.
As I Walked Out One Evening:
V4
Musée des Beaux Arts: V1
The Unknown Citizen: V3
Bishop, Elizabeth
Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6
Filling Station: V12
Blumenthal, Michael
Inventors: V7
Bly, Robert
Come with Me: V6
Bradstreet, Anne
To My Dear and Loving Husband:
V6
Brooks, Gwendolyn
The Bean Eaters: V2
The Sonnet-Ballad: V1
Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4
We Real Cool: V6
Brouwer, Joel
Last Request: V14
Clifton, Lucille
Climbing: V14
Miss Rosie: V1
Crane, Stephen
War Is Kind: V9
Cullen, Countee
Any Human to Another: V3
cummings, e. e.
l(a: V1
i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13
maggie and milly and molly and
may: V12
old age sticks: V3
Dickey, James
The Heaven of Animals: V6
The Hospital Window: V11
Dickinson, Emily
Because I Could Not Stop for
Death: V2
The Bustle in a House: V10
“Hope” Is the Thing with
Feathers: V3
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I
Died—: V5
My Life Closed Twice Before Its
Close: V8
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass:
V11
The Soul Selects Her Own
Society: V1
There’s a Certain Slant of Light:
V6
This Is My Letter to the World: V4
Dove, Rita
Geometry: V15
This Life: V1
2 4 7
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
Cumulative
Nationality/Ethnicity Index
A m e r i c a n
Dubie, Norman
The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter.
A Barn in the Urals: V12
Du Bois, W. E. B.
The Song of the Smoke: V13
Dugan, Alan
How We Heard the Name: V10
Duncan, Robert